Contract award
W H Kirkwood takes St Fillans Church fabric repairs at 499,619 pounds
By Staff Writer | 07-09-2026
The Diocese of Paisley has recorded an award to W H Kirkwood Ltd of Greenock for building fabric repair works to St Fillans Church and its former school, a Category B listed pair. The contract was concluded on 1 September 2026 at 499,619.00 pounds excluding value added tax. Seven tenders were received and all seven came from small or medium sized enterprises.
What the contract covers
The project comprises building fabric repair works to a Category B Listed Church and Former School, including roofing, leadwork, stone repair, and associated internal and external works. The building will remain occupied and operational during the works, requiring careful phasing and stakeholder coordination.
The Diocese of Paisley, contract award notice
That is the full published scope. It names four trades, roofing, leadwork, stone repair and the associated internal and external works, on a listed church that stays in use throughout. The notice does not divide the works into lots, does not give a roof area or a quantity of stone, and does not say whether the former school is occupied as well as the church.
The requirement that the building remain occupied and operational is the point a contractor will read first. It means scaffolding, access and noisy work have to be phased around services, and the notice says as much when it calls for careful phasing and stakeholder coordination. No phasing plan is published with the award.
The award value of 499,619.00 pounds excluding value added tax appears twice on the notice, once as the total value of the procurement and once as the total value of the contract. There is no published pre tender estimate on the award notice, so the figure cannot be read against a budget.
Three buyers on one notice
The notice records the contract as a joint procurement and lists three contracting authorities: the Diocese of Paisley, Historic Environment Scotland and KSN Project Management Ltd of St Vincent Street, Glasgow. The diocese is the named buyer on the release and the contact address for both the diocese and the project manager is the project manager's own. The main activity is recorded as refurbishment.
The record does not say what part each of the three plays in the contract, and this report does not guess. What can be said from the notice is that a national heritage body appears alongside the owner and its project manager on the award of a listed building repair, and that the works are classified under both construction related services and building construction work.
Seven bids, and the weighting the notice records
The bid statistics record seven tenders received, seven from small or medium sized enterprises, none from tenderers in European Union member states and seven submitted electronically. The procedure was open. The contract notice that opened the competition was published on 22 April 2026 with a deadline of 20 May 2026, so the award came a little over three months after tenders closed.
The award criteria on the notice record cost at a weighting of 40 and quality at 60. The same section also records a price line at 60. The notice does not reconcile the two entries and this report does not attempt to; the plain reading of the cost and quality lines is that quality carried the greater weight.
The contractor is W H Kirkwood Ltd, 26 Lyle Street, Greenock, recorded as a small or medium sized enterprise. The review body is Glasgow Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Court. The notice was dispatched on 1 September 2026, the same day the contract was concluded, and it states that the procurement is not covered by the Government Procurement Agreement and is not divided into lots.
Not on the record: the contract period, the start date on site, the form of contract, any provisional sums for stone and lead once opened up, and the location of the church beyond the delivery area of Glasgow and Strathclyde. For a listed building repair where the extent of decay is found rather than measured, the absence of a published contract period and of any statement on provisional sums is the gap a subcontractor pricing from this notice would notice first.