Scheduled & Unscheduled Maintenance for Mercedez-Benz HGV Trucks

This procurement has been unbdertaken in accordance with the Procurement Act 2023, utilising the Direct Award procedure (outlined in Schedule 5, section 41 of The Procurement Act 2023). The proposed justification is;

"Single Supplier - (a) due to an absence of competition for technical reasons, only a particular supplier can supply the goods, services or works required, and (b) there are no reasonable alternatives to those goods, services or works."

A Pre-Market Engagement Notice was published on 27th April 2026 and expired on 11th May 2026. The purpose of this notice was to test the potential direct award justification. Suppliers were invited to express their interest based on our mandatory requirements.

WWU received no expressions of interest to this notice. This supported the decision to follow the Direct Award Procedure.

The detailed justification was as follows:

WWU currently operates 55 Mercedez Benz HGV's across our network, they are used to support our Build & Repair (B&R) operations in their daily activity with planned and unplanned work.

Maintaining vehicle compliance and road worthiness is critical to ensuring the operational effectiveness of the BR teams and adherence to the operators license requirements. Scheduled and Unscheduled Maintenance of our Mercedez Benz HGV's can only be carried out by Mercedez Benz approved repairers. It has been identified that only 2 suppliers within the Wales and West Utilities geographical area are Mercedez Benz approved repairers, with the capacity to support WWU fleet and have authorised access to the Mercedez Benz uptime diagnostic tool.

They key operational factors supporting the decision of Direct Award are as follows:

• Emergency Response Times: MB approved repairs often involve critical infrastructure or safety critical assets. A supplier based outside Wales and West Utilities (WWU) geographical boundaries cannot meet strict emergency service level agreements (SLA's), such as arriving on-site within 1 to 2 hours of a fault occurring.
• Logistical and Transit Emissions: Shipping heavy equipment, specialised parts or deploying technical fleets from outside the region introduced severe logistical delays. It also contradicts WWU environmental sustainability targets by significantly increasing transport emissions.
• Local Mutual Aid & Network Knowledge: Familiarity with the specific regional topography, local authority permitting rules and existing network configurations is vital. External providers lack this established local ecosystem, risking prolonged VOR effecting service ability.
• Proximity of Specialised Workshops: if the repairs require assets to be transported to a specialised Mercedez Benz workshop, transmit times outside the geographical area introduce unacceptable downtime for critical fleet or plant operations.

While MB approved repair capabilities exist nationally, WWU requires a localised service delivrey model to guarantee network integrity and compliance with statutory safety timelines. Specifically, repair technicians must respond to network incidents within 60 to 90 minutes, this SLA is also written in all the scope documents for the in-house project.

Providers situations outside the WWU geographical footprint cannot realistically satisfy these response windows due to transit distances. Therefore, the requirement is not restricted to local providers by preference, but by the objective operational necessity of geographical proximity to ensure uninterrupted utility service.

O0n this basis, it has been determined that a direct award was justified under the Procurement Act 2023 (Schedule 5, section 41) due to the absence of competition for technical reasons.