Reasons for issuing a Waiver Notice in respect of a contract between Tideway and Advanced 365 Limited
| Date | 05 September 2019 |
Reasons for issuing a Waiver Notice in respect of a
contract between Tideway and Advanced 365 Limited
1. Introduction
This documents sets out our reasons for granting a waiver to Bazalgette Tunnel Limited (trading
as Tideway) of its procurement obligations in respect of a contract for certain Information
Technology (IT) services. The waiver notice can be found here.
2. Background
On 21 August 2015 Ofwat granted a Project Licence to Tideway to deliver the Thames Tideway
Tunnel project (the Project). Tideway must carry out all activities described in the Project
Specification Notice issued by the Secretary of State in respect of the Thames Tideway Tunnel,
apart from those activities that Thames Water Utilities Limited (Thames Water) is to carry out
under the Preparatory Works Notice, also issued by the Secretary of State.
The Water Industry (Specified Infrastructure Projects) (English Undertakers) Regulations 2013
(the SIP Regulations) apply a procurement regime to the Project which the incumbent water or
sewerage undertaker (in this case Thames Water) or the designated licensed infrastructure
provider (IP) (in this case Tideway), must follow in circumstances where the Utilities Contracts
Regulations 2016 (the UCR) or the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (the PCR) do not impose
a requirement to conduct a competitive tender process. However, regulation 6(8) of the SIP
Regulations permits Ofwat to issue a notice to dis-apply this regime (or aspects of the regime) in
relation to the licensed IP. The procurement regime that applies to the Project under the SIP
Regulations is a modified form of the procurement regime in the UCR (the modified
procurement regime).
At the same time that we issued a project licence to Tideway, we also issued a notice under
regulation 6(8) of the SIP Regulations dis-applying to a limited extent Tideway’s obligation to
apply the procurement provisions set out in the SIP Regulations (referred to below as a ‘Waiver
Notice’). In particular, this first Waiver Notice provided that Tideway should benefit from some
of the exemptions that apply to all utilities under the UCR. It also provided that Tideway did not
have to follow the modified procurement regime for contracts with a monetary value under a
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