Contract award
Islington lets Andover Estate landscaping on a preconstruction agreement
By Staff Writer | 03-09-2026
The London Borough of Islington has awarded soft and hard landscaping and public realm works at the Andover Estate to Etec Contract Services at 190,868 pounds excluding value added tax, with the contractor appointed first under a preconstruction services agreement. The contract was concluded on 2 September 2026 and the award notice was published at 16:34 the same day.
Two tenders were received. The award was made on price alone: the award criteria section of the notice records one criterion, price, and nothing else. Etec Contract Services is recorded at a London address, with company number 5392794, and as a small or medium sized enterprise. The procedure was restricted, and the notice records an earlier publication for the same procedure.
A preconstruction agreement on a contract of this size is unusual. The council has bought design development, surveys, value engineering and a materials take off before it has bought the works.
The two stage appointment
The notice sets out the sequence. The initial appointment is by way of a preconstruction services agreement, which allows the contractor to detail out the design and specification, undertake necessary surveys, outline any opportunity for value engineering, and quantify existing materials on site. Once the preconstruction period completes, the supplier provides all labour, materials, equipment and supervision required to deliver the full scope of soft and hard landscaping works in accordance with the drawings and specifications. The contractor is made responsible for coordinating with other trades, maintaining a safe and tidy site, and protecting existing features.
Two of those preconstruction tasks are worth reading closely. Quantifying existing materials on site is a reuse exercise: it establishes what paving, kerb, topsoil and planting can be kept or recycled, and that determines both cost and programme. Protecting existing features is an obligation that survives into the works, and on an occupied estate it is the obligation most often tested, because the features are trees, boundaries and surfaces that residents use every day.
Where the work is
The site is identified on the notice through the council's own address for the procurement: land bounded by Hornsey Road, Seven Sisters Road, Durham Road and Moray Road in north London. The classification is construction work, and the additional codes cover site preparation, demolition and earthmoving, excavating, and landscaping work for green areas, parks, gardens, playgrounds and roads. The breadth of those codes is a procurement convenience rather than a scope: they are drawn from a standard list and several of them, for airports, golf courses and cemeteries, plainly do not apply to a housing estate.
What the record shows about the process
The short description and the description of the procurement on the notice both open with the template instruction the buyer was meant to overwrite, telling the author to give a brief overview with enough detail to encourage prospective suppliers to download the specification. The substantive text follows it. That is a drafting matter rather than a legal one, and the scope wording behind it is complete, but it is on the published record.
The notice publishes no duration and no completion date, so the length of the preconstruction period and the start of the works are not on the record. It publishes no breakdown between the preconstruction fee and the works sum, which matters because the 190,868 pounds is given as the total value of the contract and of the procurement. It records no options. Review of the procurement is directed to the London Borough of Haringey rather than to a court, the contact email given for the buyer is in the haringey.gov.uk domain, and the buyer's main internet address on the notice points to the dynamic purchasing pages of a London construction programme.
Awarding on price with a preconstruction stage attached puts the quality question in the wrong order for anyone reading the notice cold. The contractor is selected on the lowest price for a scope that the same contractor will then help to define during preconstruction. The protection against that sits in the preconstruction agreement itself, in how the design is fixed and how the works sum is agreed at the end of the first stage, and none of that is published with the notice.