Four contractors win places on £500m 'collaborative' Midlands framework

Four major contractors have secured places on a four-year £500m framework from the Midlands Highways Alliance - a regional group of local authorities.

Galliford Try, Balfour Beatty, Eurovia and Morgan Sindall all have a seat at the table for the latest edition of the Midlands contractual arrangement, which will be the third generation framework released by the alliance.

The alliance's procurement model covers work across 21 local authorities from Barnsley and Doncaster and Lincolnshire in the north and east to Staffordshire and Telford and Wrekin in the West to Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the south.

The framework is based on the NEC 4 standard contract approach, which puts puts collaboration and collective risk sharing front and centre in the procurement process.

Further details on projects are expected to be released in the coming weeks and, following a meeting with the contractors in the next couple of days, headline achievement targets for the overall framework are due to be released in September this year.

Peter Barclay, alliance manager, told Highways: 'The framework has been a big collaborative effort by our authorities and we are very proud of it. It various improvements on our previous efforts, including a more collaborative approach from the contractors. We also now have X22 clauses in the framework. This is all about early contractor involvement, which we are very keen to encourage.'