COMPETITIVE TENDERING AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE HIGHWAYS EXPERIENCE.

Abstract

Lincolnshire County Council has adopted a strategy that exceeds statutory requirements for highway maintenance and construction, grounds maintenance, waste disposal and professional highway engineering services. In-house services are tested against reputable companies in the private sector which involves tailoring the contracts to encourage interest. The organisation has been changed to clearly separate client and internal contractor roles and semi-autonomous internal contractor units have been set up. The result has been to reduce the Highways and Planning staff from 950 to 298. Information Technology is used extensively in client job management and a standard document is used for the appointment of consulting engineers. The strategy has brought about savings partly by using less costly contractors and partly from an increase in labour efficiency within the internal trading units. Maintenance priorities are no longer determined by the need for a large DLO workforce; standardised specifications, drawings and work descriptions have improved and the increased share of the maintenance work by private contractor provides project management with more flexibility. However there is evidence that the quality of highway design has deteriorated over the last four years particularly from the private sector. More quality control measures are to be introduced to attempt to resolve this problem.