Digital Test Platform – Service Continuity, Transition and Exit Contract

CPV: IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Procedure method

Award procedure without prior publication of a call for competition

Legal basis

CELEX · 32014L0024 Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (Directive 2014/24/EU)

Procurement category

Services

Notice status

Awarded without competition

Procurement threshold

Unspecified in notice

Regulatory regime

Standard

Commercial structure

Stand-alone contract (no framework)

Competition type

Direct award (no call for competition)

GPA / WTO covered

Yes (GPA)

Recurring procurement

Unspecified in notice

First published

26 Oct 2021, 14:34 BST

Last source update

26 Oct 2021, 14:34 BST

Authority reference

C41888

FTS notice number

2021/S 000-026784

Classification (CPV)

IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Delivery area

Yorkshire & Humber (UKE42)

Official registry OCID

ocds-h6vhtk-02f00d Find a Tender

Why no open competition

The works, supplies or services can be provided only by a particular economic operator due to absence of competition for technical reasons

Published justification

NHS Digital is satisfied the tests permitting use of the negotiated procedure without prior publication (Regulation 32(2)(b(ii)) are met:A. The works, supplies or services can be supplied only by a particular economic operator as competition is absent for technical reasons: The digital platform has been developed with a technical architecture to interoperate with the other suppliers of testing services, and a transition away from this platform whilst there is still a significant level of change to the nature of the services risks disrupting the continuity of services. Deloitte has begun to carry out work to disaggregate the services, which as each element completes allows NHS Digital to undertake phased re-procurement activity of separate elements of the service. This work will later expand into the provision of exit and transition activities to facilitate the orderly transition to the replacement supplier(s). On the basis that this disaggregation work needs to complete prior to re-procurement, competition is absent for technical reasons as there is no alternative operator who can provide the business as usual services without interruption, whilst also providing services to allow for disaggregation and to facilitate re-procurement.B. No reasonable alternative or substitute exists: A change in contractor for the provision of the digital platform would cause significant duplication of costs as any replacement provider would have to dedicate substantial resource to establishing and understanding the detailed design and operation of the platform and how it interoperates with other service providers. Further, as well as incurring the costs involved in ensuring the transition of data from the current supplier to the new provider, transition to a new supplier could put the operation of the digital testing platform at risk of disruption or force change freezes which would cause significant inconvenience, not only to NHS Digital, but to the wider public on the end to end testing journey. This could have serious implications to public health and the containment of the spread of the virus.C. The absence of competition is not the result of an artificial narrowing down of the parameters of the procurement: this procurement is part of a procurement strategy by NHS Digital to disaggregate the services, removing interdependencies and allowing for the formation of independent services capable of transition to replacement suppliers thus allowing the competition of services through ongoing openly advertised procurement processes.

Publisher note: In addition to the sub-contracts referenced in V.2.5, the supplier also passes on to NHS Digital the charges at cost for a number of third party services. These third party services have an estimated value of £1,500,000 and are included within the total contract value of £56,500,000. These third party services include toolsets for the management of the software development process, as well as AWS cloud infrastructure for both non-production and production environments, used to deploy and host the web portal and iOS applications.The material third party suppliers providing services at the contract award date are as follows (the threshold for materiality is based on third parties providing services with an aggregate spend under the contract above £10,000):- Atlassian- AWS- Google Cloud Reseller- Azure Devops- BrowserStack- ServiceNow- PagerDuty- Snyk- RapidSpike- Synopsys Coverity. Where it is commercially beneficial, NHS Digital may transition some of these third party services in house during the term of the contract. Part of the service disaggregation provided under this contract includes the migration of services onto HALO which is a DHSC/UK HSA instance of AWS, thus reducing and ultimately removing dependency on the Deloitte AWS instance. The other third party services are under review.Deloitte LLP also uses a number of other Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited entities within the provision of the services. The subcontracts with these other Deloitte entities represent approximately 13% of the total costs.The value likely to be subcontracted set on in V.2.5 has been calculated on the basis of the subcontracts set out in V.2.5, as well as the value of the third party services and the subcontracts with the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited entities. In relation to section II.2.5, this contract was awarded to the supplier to facilitate continuity of service and for the provision of services to disaggregate the solution, removing interdependencies and allowing for the formation of independent services capable of transition to replacement suppliers. Given the bespoke nature of the digital testing platform, this disaggregation work is complex and there are technical limitations which prevent other suppliers from being able to carry out the work in the required timeframe without risking the stability of the platform.

• Deloitte LLPAwarded supplierOC303675 2 New Street Square, London, North East, EC4A 3HQ

No document links were published on the notice.