Contract award
Three Ayrshire councils award a twenty year charging concession
By Staff Writer | 03-09-2026
East Ayrshire Council has awarded a twenty year electric vehicle charging concession to Believ Limited, acting as lead authority for North Ayrshire Council and South Ayrshire Council. The concession award notice, published at 12:19pm on 2 September 2026, records a total value of 58,000,000 pounds excluding value added tax and states that the final value over the twenty year term is unknown.
The award decision was taken on 26 August 2026. Two tenders were received, both from small or medium sized enterprises, both submitted by electronic means and both from tenderers based outside European Union member states. The concession was not awarded to a group of economic operators. Believ Limited, of 3 Valentine Place, London, is recorded on the notice as a small or medium sized enterprise.
The figure on the notice is a value for the procurement, not a guaranteed sum. The council states in terms that the total final value of the concession over its twenty year duration is unknown.
What the concession covers
The notice describes the procurement of a private sector partner to adopt the Ayrshire authorities' existing charging infrastructure and to expand the public charging network within Ayrshire through a mix of public and private funding. Alongside that, the partner supplies and installs fleet and depot charging infrastructure, which the notice records as funded by the partner councils. The three councils procured together, with East Ayrshire leading, and the duration of the concession is given as 240 months.
The main classification is electrical services. The additional codes reach well beyond the supply of chargers: car park building construction work, parking lot construction work, road construction works, parking lot surface painting, installation of bollards, installation of electrical and mechanical equipment, engineering design for traffic installations, electricity distribution and the operation of electrical installations. Read together they describe civil and electrical work on the highway and in council car parks rather than an equipment supply.
How it was let
The procedure was an award procedure with prior publication of a concession notice. The earlier notice for the same procedure was published in 2025. The council envisaged shortlisting up to five bidders, and two tenders came in.
Quality carried seventy per cent of the award and price thirty. Nine criteria are named on the notice: approach to the delivery of new charging infrastructure; approach to adopting transferring infrastructure and to exit handover at contract expiry; business continuity throughout the contract duration; tariff structure; approach to providing high quality and affordable services; financial commitments and delivery assurances; community benefits and fair work first; and alignment with national policies and with local ambitions. The award was made on the overall most economically advantageous tender received.
Two of those criteria carry most of the risk for the three councils. The first is adoption and transfer: the partner takes over charge points the councils already own, so the condition, age and utilisation of that estate at handover is a valuation question rather than a design question. The second is exit handover at expiry, which is being priced now for an event two decades away, on assets that do not yet exist.
Tariff structure sits inside the quality assessment rather than the price assessment, which is consistent with a concession: the partner recovers its investment at the charge point rather than through a works payment from the councils. That is also why the notice can state a value for the procurement and in the same section state that the final value is unknown. What the concession is worth depends on how much electricity is sold over twenty years, and on tariffs the councils will not set.
What the notice does not say
The notice publishes no unit count, so how many charge points the partner adopts and how many are to be added is not on the record. It publishes no phasing, no capital commitment from either side, no revenue share and no service levels. It names no site. It gives no split between the public network and the fleet and depot infrastructure, although the funding of those two limbs is described differently, the first through a mix of public and private money and the second by the councils. Any review of the procurement goes to Kilmarnock Sheriff Court.