Contract award

Harlow Council appoints two consultants to housing capital programme

By Staff Writer  |  19 August 2026

Harlow Council has appointed calfordseaden LLP as mechanical and electrical engineer and McBains Ltd as principal designer on the capital programme covering its housing stock, under two contracts signed on 19 August 2026.

Both awards were published on the official tender service on 19 August 2026. The mechanical and electrical engineer contract is recorded at 524,600 pounds and drew five bids. The principal designer contract is recorded at 172,025 pounds and drew eight bids. Both were procured by restricted procedure and both are classified as architectural, construction, engineering and inspection services.

The notices state that the services form part of the council's commitment to transform Harlow's housing, to invest in housing stock and to meet landlord obligations. The council is named as the buyer and the London Borough of Haringey is named as the review body.

The mechanical and electrical scope covers the majority of the planned capital projects. The notice lists attending meetings, site visits, preparation of condition reports with recommendations, identifying the need for further specialist design, identifying the need for statutory and third party approvals and agreements, estimating the cost of works, technical design and specification including drawings for building control approval and the tender pack, preparation of the scope and schedule of works for the tender pack, and preparation of as-built drawings on completion of works.

The principal designer scope is expressed differently. Its stated deliverables are the delivery of principal designer services across all relevant projects, provision of services that are safe, compliant and accessible to all residents, consistent achievement of the outputs set out in the scope of requirement, and transparent reporting to the council on performance, compliance and risks. The notice assumes the core services will be required across RIBA stages 2 to 6, while recording that the exact requirement will be as defined in the Building Safety Act 2022.

No further breakdown of the programme, its value or its duration is published in either notice, and none is stated here.

What the practitioner should take from this

The phrase carrying the most weight in these two notices is the reference to the Building Safety Act 2022. Principal designer is a title that now means two different things at once. Under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 the principal designer controls the pre-construction phase for health and safety purposes. Under the building regulations system introduced by the 2022 Act, the principal designer for building regulations purposes carries a separate duty to plan, manage and monitor design work so that, if built, the building would be compliant. The two roles can be held by the same organisation and frequently are, but they arise under different instruments and they are not discharged by the same evidence.

An appointment that assumes RIBA stages 2 to 6 while deferring the exact requirement to the statute is therefore doing real work in a short sentence. It tells a bidder that the scope will be set by legislation rather than by the fee proposal, and it leaves open which of the council's projects will be higher-risk buildings attracting the gateway procedures. On a housing capital programme covering existing stock, that classification will vary project by project according to height and use, so the same consultant may sit inside the gateway procedures on one block and outside them on the next.

The split between the two appointments is the second point worth noting. Placing mechanical and electrical design with one firm and principal designer duties with another is common and defensible, but it puts the coordination duty across the interface. Where a condition report recommends a plant replacement, the designer preparing the specification and the designer carrying the statutory monitoring duty are different organisations with different appointments, different professional indemnity cover and, unless the contracts say otherwise, no direct obligation to each other. Clients running this structure usually address it by imposing an express duty to cooperate and by holding both appointments to a single information protocol.

The third point is procedural. Both contracts record the date of signature as the date the award notice was published. Anyone considering the procurement position should read the notices themselves rather than a summary of them, because the standstill and challenge timetable runs from the notice and not from the announcement of an outcome.