Contract award
Four firms take Northern Ireland civil engineering minor works framework
By Staff Writer | 25 August 2026
Construction and Procurement Delivery, part of the Department of Finance in Northern Ireland, has appointed four contractors to its pan government collaborative framework agreement for civil engineering minor works. The award notice was published on 25 August 2026 at 10:14am under the identifier 080698-2026, against the department reference DOF 5627129, and records four contracts all signed on 18 June 2026.
The framework is let in four lots covering two geographical areas. Lot 1 is the Northern Area and Lot 2 the Southern Area. Lot 3 is the reserve for the Northern Area and Lot 4 the reserve for the Southern Area. The notice records that any one economic operator will be awarded only one lot, and that each call off contract will not normally exceed 750,000 pounds. The framework is open to public sector bodies across Northern Ireland.
Lot 1, Northern Area, went to Adman Civil Projects Limited at 15,694,525.14 pounds. Lot 2, Southern Area, went to Whitemountain Quarries Ltd trading as Breedon at 18,979,753.33 pounds. Lot 3, reserve for the Northern Area, went to Lowry Building Civil Engineering Ltd at 22,296,426.00 pounds. Lot 4, reserve for the Southern Area, went to BSG Civil Engineering Ltd at 25,768,886.61 pounds.
Why those four figures cannot be added together
The arithmetic invites a total and the structure forbids one. Lots 3 and 4 are reserves for the same two geographical areas that Lots 1 and 2 already cover, so the four values describe overlapping capacity rather than four separate pots of work. A reserve operator is there to take call offs the primary operator cannot, which means the same requirement can appear in two of the four figures. The notice publishes no aggregate framework value, and any sum produced from the four lot values would be a derived figure resting on an assumption the notice does not make.
The bid statistics are recorded lot by lot and are identical across all four: seventeen bids, of which one was from a small or medium sized enterprise and one came from outside the European Union, with all seventeen submitted electronically. Seventeen bidders for a minor works framework in a jurisdiction of this size is a full market, and the reserve structure means four of them left with a place.
What the framework is for
The procurement codes on the notice are 45200000, 45220000, 45233100, 45233139 and 45233141: complete or part construction and civil engineering work, engineering and construction works, and construction, maintenance and repair work for highways and roads. Minor works frameworks of this kind carry the drainage, footway, kerbing, patching, small structures and local road work that a department or an agency needs continuously and cannot sensibly tender one job at a time.
The 750,000 pound ceiling per call off is the term that governs the commercial behaviour. It caps the size of any single instruction, which keeps the framework inside the minor works category it was advertised as, and it puts anything larger back out to a separate procurement. A contractor pricing a place on a framework like this is pricing a rate for repeated small jobs across a whole region, not a lump sum for a scheme it has seen.
The terms the notice reserves
The notice carries an unusually full reservation of rights. The contracting authority reserves the right not to award any contract as a result of the process, to change the content and structure of the competition, and to vary its requirements and the procedures for conducting the award. It states that it will not be liable for any costs incurred by candidates, that the process may be terminated or suspended at any time without cost or liability, and that no contractual rights arise expressly or by implication from the notice or the procedures it envisages.
It also records that any contract awarded is to be treated as made in Northern Ireland and subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Northern Ireland courts, and that the authority will disqualify an operator that is ineligible under regulation 57 of the Public Contracts Regulations, or that supplies information which later proves untrue or incorrect, or that fails to supply information within the timescale required. Tenders were submitted through the department's own electronic tendering portal.
The gap between signature on 18 June 2026 and publication on 25 August 2026 is a little over nine weeks, so call offs may already have been placed under the framework by the time the market read the notice.