Provision of Library Services for HMP Bure, HMP Norwich, HMP Wayland and HMP The Mount

The direct award of library services to the supplier are strictly necessary for reasons of extreme and unavoidable urgency. The Ministry of Justice has a legal requirement to secure the provision of education and training for prisoners (Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009). Section 86 of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 provides that the Secretary of State must secure the provision of such education and training facilities as he/she considers appropriate for education and training suitable to the requirements of prisoners. The incumbent library supplier advised that they would be unable to continue providing a service due to their contractual arrangements ceasing with the local authority on 30th June 2025. This resulted in the supplier going into termination as this represented the majority of their business and they were unable to continue operations due to the loss of this local authority contract. This created a huge challenge for the Authority because there is a statutory obligation to provide prison library services and service provision cannot disrupted. Given these reasons of extreme and unavoidable urgency, these services could not be awarded on the basis of a competitive tendering procedure (due to timescales involved and that the supplier only provided 2 months notice of cessation of business). The urgency is unavoidable as it is not attributable to any act or omission of the contracting authority and could not have been reasonably foreseen by the contracting authority. The business owner's requirement is to maintain current delivery and system stability, with future contracts being based on the services currently delivered, with all Terms and Conditions and contract value remaining unchanged. The actual contract date is 02/07/2025-31/03/2029.