Cheshire East Council – Biowaste Procurement/technologies Support

WRM were appointed by Cheshire East Council as technical advisor on a procurement for a solution to treat c. 45,000 tonnes of co-mingled food and garden waste. They were keen to consider a range of technology solutions including high and low solids anaerobic digestion (AD) as well as in-vessel composting which presented a challenge in developing a procurement structure that provided the ability to compare between technologies.

As a result of its complexity, the Council chose to use the competitive dialogue procurement route and required support from WRM throughout the dialogue and evaluation stages up to and including the closure of the contract with preferred bidder.

Delivery of the procurement process required a range of inputs from WRM which included the following:

• Development of the technical specification, background information, instruction to tenderers, draft contract schedules and method statement documents
• Leading technical dialogue and clarification with bidders within the competitive dialogue framework
• Development of the evaluation framework, scoring approach and evaluation of received responses
• Close working with legal and financial advisers on aspects such as price evaluation and contract development
• Preparation of the evaluation report for presentation to full Council Cabinet

The preferred bidder is currently in the process of obtaining all required permissions and consents and WRM will continue to advise the Council in a contract supervision capacity as the contractor mobilises their solution. It is expected that the facility will commence full operations in April  2019.