May Gurney in line for £126m Cheshire contract
24 August 2011
Cheshire West and Chester council has today (August 24) named May Gurney as the front-runner for its £126 million waste and recycling collection contract.
Senior officers at the council – which replaced the boroughs of Ellesmere Port & Neston, Vale Royal and Chester in April 2009 – have recommended that the council’s executive appoint the company as preferred bidder when they meet next month.
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- The new contract involves the collection of waste and recycling from 147,000 households across Cheshire West and Chester
The 14-year contract will enable Cheshire West and Chester to harmonise collection arrangements across the new unitary borough which it inherited from the district councils. It will also enable it to maximise recycling, minimise carbon emissions and reduce costs by at least £1.58 million (15%).
Following an extensive public consultation in summer 2010, the council also decided that the new service should provide separate weekly collections of kitchen food waste and fortnightly collections of residual waste.
The contract will start in April 2012 and will cover: kerbside collection for 147,000 households; bring banks; processing of food and garden waste; sale of recyclables; cost of replacement containers; and, provision of bulking sites, vehicles and plant.
It also includes a pioneering new bulky waste collection, reuse and recycling service which the new contractor will subcontract to an established local third sector group – the Cheshire Furniture Reuse Forum.
Eight bidders qualified to take part in the procurement process. Six submitted detailed solutions in February 2011. From these Biffa and May Gurney were shortlisted for the final tender stage as part of a three stage competitive dialogue process.
“May Gurney’s final tender scored highly on both quality and price,” said Helen de Lemos, senior manager for waste strategy at Cheshire West and Chester council. “The proposed new service uses its innovative kerbside-sort system to collect high quality recyclable materials and kitchen waste on a weekly basis. Residual waste will be collected fortnightly in a 180 litre wheeled bin. Its proposal also greatly expands the number of materials collected for recycling in line with the response to our public consultation.
“May Gurney’s proposal would see the council’s overall recycling increase from 48% to over 60% in year 2 whilst achieving collection savings of over £50 million over the lifetime of the contract – well above the council’s target.”
Savings
To incentivise bidders to guarantee high reuse, recycling and composting tonnages, the council linked their guaranteed tonnage to their price evaluation by taking into account the estimated disposal cost savings.
Mrs Lemos said: “May Gurney’s proposal will provide additional disposal savings of around £26 million due to its high guaranteed diversion tonnages – leading to a total savings of over £76 million.
“The council used last year’s public consultation exercise to identify key ‘customer service’ aspects of collection services that are important to our residents. These have been incorporated into the proposed new service, including improved performance standards for returning bins after collection and clearing spills and state of the art in-cab real-time reporting technology.
“May Gurney has proposed reuse and recycling routes for the redundant bins from the existing services and the income generated will be used to offset contract costs. The high recycling combined with vehicle efficiencies will also support the council’s commitment to reducing its carbon emissions.”
The new unitary council inherited two kerbside-sort services with alternate weekly collections and a third service which combined a co-mingled system with weekly residual waste collections in a smaller bin. These three separate services are currently delivered by SITA, Focsa and the DSO,.
Mrs Lemos said: “All three services performed strongly so it was impossible to pick between them.”
“Competitive dialogue allowed us to invite experienced waste management companies to propose their own designs for a cutting edge service that would meet our aims. It allowed us to directly compare very different collection methodologies and gave us the flexibility to introduce new approaches and the ability to refine the proposed solutions before final tenders.”
Cllr Lynn Riley, portfolio holder for community and environment at the council added: “The new contract on offer demonstrates what the Council means when we talk about our commitment to customer service by delivering the most innovative services we can whilst achieving the best value for money for our council tax payers.”
WRAP provided support to help the council define the scope of the procurement at the beginning of the project.
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Following a decision being made on the preferred bidder by the council’s executive, officers will enter into a clarification period with the bidder. The contract is expected to be formally awarded by early November 2011.
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