Contract Watch: what the public sector bought this quarter

Contract Watch pulls fresh public-sector fleet tenders straight from the procurement APIs each week. Individually they are useful mainly to the handful of suppliers bidding. Collected over a quarter, they are something else: a read on where public money is actually going in fleet, as opposed to where policy says it is going.

This is the first of these. The sample is small - Contract Watch has been running since July - so treat it as a baseline rather than a trend. It gets more useful every quarter.

What went out

Environment Agency: bodywork repair framework, re-tendered. A re-tender rather than a new requirement, which tells you the incumbent arrangement reached its end and the need did not. Bodywork and repair frameworks are the unglamorous end of fleet procurement and among the most consistently renewed. This one splits into four regional contracts.

Provision of commercial vehicle repairs, servicing and maintenance. Norse Commercial Services seeking a dual-depot maintenance partner. Straightforward maintenance provision, notable mainly because it is a commercial vehicle requirement being contracted out rather than run in-house.

HRA: EV charging project. Housing-sector charging infrastructure, at market engagement stage. This is the category most likely to grow, and the one where the grid connection constraints we covered in issue 8 will bite hardest.

Public sector orders 26 self-charging hybrids for demanding operations. From issue 11, and the most interesting item here for reasons set out below.

The read

Three things stand out even from four data points.

Maintenance and repair are being contracted, not electrified. Two of the four items are servicing, maintenance and bodywork. That is the everyday reality of running a public fleet, and it will remain the majority of procurement spend for years regardless of what the vehicle mix does. Suppliers in the SMR and bodywork space have a more stable pipeline than the coverage of this sector would suggest.

Charging procurement is arriving through unexpected doors. The EV charging tender came from a housing body, not a transport one. Charging infrastructure procurement is increasingly being run by organisations whose primary business is not fleet, which has implications for how it is specified and who is qualified to bid.

Hybrid is still winning the hard duty cycles. Twenty-six self-charging hybrids for demanding operations is a procurement decision made by people who have looked at a specific duty cycle and concluded that battery-electric does not yet do the job. That is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. For emergency response, rural coverage and any operation where refuelling time is operationally critical, the honest answer today is often hybrid, and public buyers with real accountability are reaching it.

That finding sits slightly awkwardly against the electrification arithmetic elsewhere in this set, and we are going to leave the tension there rather than resolve it. Both things are true. The running-cost case for electric vans on urban duty cycles is now overwhelming. The case for electric on unpredictable, high-availability duty cycles is not yet made.

What we will track from here

Each quarter we will report volume of tenders by category, the split between new requirements and re-tenders, and any shift in the powertrain specified. The re-tender ratio is the most interesting of these over time: it distinguishes genuine expansion in public fleet spend from the same money going round again.

If you bid into public-sector fleet work and there is a category you would find useful broken out, tell us.