Contract award
Mine water pumping test awarded with a temporary treatment plant
By Staff Writer | 26 August 2026
The Mining Remediation Authority has awarded the West Cannock pumping test and temporary treatment contract to J.N. Bentley Limited of Skipton at 1,584,972.76 pounds excluding value added tax and 1,901,967.31 pounds including it. The award notice was published on 25 August 2026 at 10:22am under the identifier 080709-2026 and the award is recorded as pending rather than active.
The contract period runs from 14 September 2026 to 13 September 2027, a full year. The procedure was an open procedure and the tender is recorded as complete.
The work is a pumping test to determine the long term management of rising mine water in the Cannock coalfield. The authority states that this forms part of its purpose to deliver for communities and to protect the environment.
The temporary plant exists because of the water chemistry
The notice sets out why a treatment plant is part of a pumping test at all. Initial mine water chemistry results from the two boreholes identified, among other determinands, zinc concentrations too elevated for untreated discharge into the local watercourse or sewer network. For the pumping test to proceed, a temporary mine water treatment plant is required before the water can be discharged to the local watercourse.
That sequencing is the commercial shape of the job. The test is the objective; the plant is the enabling work without which the test cannot run. A contractor is being asked to design, install, operate and remove a treatment process sized against chemistry taken from two boreholes before sustained pumping has begun.
Where the risk sits over twelve months
Rising mine water is not chemically constant. A year of continuous abstraction draws from a larger volume than a borehole sample represents, and the notice records zinc as one determinand among others without publishing the concentrations found or the discharge limits that must be met. Neither the treatment process nor the design basis is named on the notice.
The question a contractor must answer before it prices this is what happens if the water arriving at the plant during the test differs from the water the plant was sized for. That is a change in the conditions the works meet rather than in the works themselves, and whether it is at the contractor's cost turns on how the contract defines the design basis and who owns the borehole data. The notice does not say, and on a year long contract it is the single provision worth reading first.
The award status
The award is recorded as pending. That is not the same as an active award: it records a decision taken and published rather than a contract in force, and the contract period on the notice does not begin until 14 September 2026. Until it does, the position stated on the notice is a stated intention to contract on the published terms.
The authority publishes no value breakdown between the pumping test and the temporary treatment plant, so it is not possible to say from the notice how much of the 1,584,972.76 pounds is the enabling work and how much is the test it enables. What the notice does establish is that the outcome of a one year test is what will decide the permanent scheme for the coalfield, so the work being priced here is investigative rather than remedial.