Tender
Northern Ireland health trusts tender electrical testing across five bodies
By Staff Writer | 26 August 2026
Five Northern Ireland health bodies have tendered a single electrical testing contract with a stated value of 16,904,330.70 pounds excluding value added tax and 21,130,413 pounds including it. The notice was published on 25 August 2026 at 1:39pm under the identifier 080856-2026 and the tender period closes at 3:00pm on 22 September 2026.
The work is split into three lots. Lot 1, fixed wire testing including remedial repairs, is valued at 8,316,228.87 pounds. Lot 2, portable appliance testing including remedial repairs, is valued at 1,667,337.96 pounds. Lot 3, maintenance of emergency lighting, is valued at 6,920,763.87 pounds. The three lot values add to the published total exactly, and each carries value added tax at twenty per cent on the gross figure given.
The buyers named on the notice are the Northern, South Eastern, Southern and Western Health and Social Care Trusts, together with the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service Trust. The competition is run by the Regional Business Services Organisation Procurement and Logistics Service in Belfast, which the notice names as the procuring entity and process contact point.
Remedial repairs sit inside two of the three lots
Fixed wire testing and portable appliance testing are both tendered with remedial repairs attached. That is the commercially awkward part of the package, because inspection volumes can be counted in advance from an asset register while remedial volumes cannot. A fixed wire test either passes or produces a schedule of defects, and the notice publishes no figure for the defects the tenderers should expect.
Nothing in the notice states how remedial work is to be priced, whether against a schedule of rates, a percentage addition or daywork. Nothing states whether the contractor is obliged to carry out remedials found during testing or only to report them. Those two points decide where the money in this contract actually sits, and neither is answered on the face of the notice.
One competition across five bodies
The four trusts named cover separate areas and the ambulance service operates across all of them. A single competition for that footprint produces one set of rates and one contractual route for the whole of the health estate involved, which is administratively simpler for the buyers and moves the mobilisation risk on to the successful tenderers.
The notice does not publish a schedule of the properties covered, so the size and spread of the estate are not stated in it. A tenderer pricing fixed wire testing without a property schedule is pricing travel, access and out of hours working on assumption rather than on data, and access to occupied clinical space is the constraint that usually governs productivity on this kind of work.
The timetable
The procedure is an open procedure, so there is no separate selection stage: any organisation that meets the conditions may tender directly. Tenders are due by 3:00pm on 22 September 2026, twenty eight days after publication, and the award period ends on 9 November 2026, forty eight days after the tender deadline.
Four weeks is a short window for a three lot tender covering an estate that the notice does not describe, and it is shorter still for a tenderer intending to bid all three lots. The description of the requirement runs to two sentences. Everything that governs the price, meaning the property list, the volumes, the remedial pricing basis and the rules on access, sits in the tender documents rather than in the notice, so the practical first step is to obtain them and read the remedial provisions before deciding which lots to chase.