A £100,000 service contract for car park signage in England, with the same notice revealing a November 2023 award date and a July 2024 publication date. The lag is the lesson. [S1]
Procurement officers reading an awarded notice should expect the metadata, not just the headline, to shape their specification. Here, the headline value is fixed but the description frames the work as ad hoc, short-notice installation, which is the real constraint a specifying engineer must price in. [S1]
What the notice actually says
The contract is for the design, manufacture, and installation of a range of signs erected occasionally at short notice for the Council's car parks. The CPV classification sits under Signs and illuminated signs, and Shop signs, locating the work firmly in external and internal static signage rather than digital or architectural finishes. [S1]
The award was made on 15 November 2023 following a 27 October 2023, 12pm close. The notice was published on 18 July 2024, well after the contract start of 11 December 2023 and within the four-year term ending 10 December 2027. [S1]
Reading the value and term
The Value of contract field shows £100,000 with no further breakdown. The Service contract type and four-year window imply an averaged annual envelope that an engineer can use as a sanity check against comparable local authority car park signage frameworks. [S1]
Because the description emphasises occasional, short-notice installation, the spend pattern is unlikely to be linear. Reactive call-out demand typically clusters around enforcement changes, tariff revisions, and resurfacing works, so a schedule of rates with a defined response window is the most defensible specification vehicle at this value. [S1]
Procedure and bidder suitability
The procedure is Open procedure, meaning any interested supplier could submit a tender. The contract is marked suitable for SMEs but not suitable for VCSEs, which constrains the social-value narrative in the award criteria to SME participation rather than VCSE partnership. [S1]
A previous opportunity notice was published on 2 October 2023, giving bidders a short window of just over seven weeks from opportunity to close. Specifying engineers can replicate this tempo by pre-loading compliant BoQ templates so that the bid window is spent on pricing, not documentation. [S1]
Engineering implications for the spec
A CPV mix of illuminated and non-illuminated signs, plus shop signs, suggests a single supplier is expected to cover both fabricated metalwork and lit units. The spec should therefore state the interface responsibility clearly, including power supply, isolation, and out-of-hours coordination, since the description flags short-notice installation as a core requirement. [S1]
The notice does not name a winning supplier or award value, and it does not specify materials, fixings, or photometric performance. Any reuse of this award as a benchmark must treat the £100,000 figure as a total envelope, not a per-asset rate, and must be paired with a separate rates schedule built from the activity profile implied by the short-notice clause. [S1]
Primary notice: Contracts Finder.