Supply of Negative Bearings for Circle, District & Hammersmith and City Lines

Direct Award justifications: Additional goods, works or services procured under PA23

Direct Award in accordance to the Procurement Act 2023, Section 41.6, Schedule 5, Paragraph 7, quoted directly below:

Schedule 5 - Direct Award Justifications Paragraph 7 - The public contract concerns the supply of goods, services or works by the existing supplier which are intended as an extension to, or partial replacement of, existing goods, services or works in circumstances where:

(a) a change in supplier would result in the contracting authority receiving goods, services or works that are different from, or incompatible with, the existing goods, services or works, and

(b) the difference or incompatibility would result in disproportionate technical difficulties in operation or maintenance.

A direct award to Schaeffler is justified as any change in supplier could result in bearings that are incompatible with the existing bogie, axle and negative shoegear interfaces and would therefore create disproportionate technical difficulties for TfL.

Schaeffler designed the original S-stock Negative Bearings to Alstom's specifications (train manufacturer), and the detailed engineering parameters, manufacturing tolerances, material characteristics and performance data required to replicate the component to an identical standard are not available to the market. An alternative supplier would therefore need to reverse engineer the bearing without access to the original design specifications, which could result in, a technically different product, requiring extensive validation to establish that it could integrate reliably with the established load paths, rotational characteristics and safety critical clearances of the S-stock bogie system.