Contract award

Bus depot electrification awarded at Bradford and Huddersfield

By Staff Writer  |  22 August 2026

West Yorkshire Combined Authority has published two contract award notices for the electrification of bus depots at Bradford and Huddersfield. The Bradford works are recorded at 16,628,081 pounds and the Huddersfield works at 10,550,368 pounds. Both notices name First West Yorkshire Limited and both were published on 21 August 2026.

The two notices describe the same arrangement at two sites. Electric buses are to operate from each depot to provide local services under the West Yorkshire bus franchising scheme, as part of the introduction of the Weaver Network. The Combined Authority states that it is currently negotiating the purchase of the depots, but that it anticipates the operator having exclusive access to each depot before franchised services begin, and that the Combined Authority requires the operator to procure the electrification works so that they are in place beforehand.

The funding is to come from the Joint Air Quality Unit and the West Yorkshire Transport Fund. The Combined Authority records that it has agreed to grant fund the electrification, and that it acknowledges the funding agreement could be viewed as a works contract because the works will ultimately benefit the Combined Authority. It states that it has therefore chosen to comply with the Procurement Act 2023 in procuring the funding and the delivery of these works. Both notices record the procurement method as a direct award.

The recorded contract periods differ. The Bradford works run from 14 September 2026 to 25 June 2027. The Huddersfield works run from 14 September 2026 to 14 May 2027. The award status on both notices is recorded as pending. Neither notice publishes a breakdown of the works beyond the words electrification works, and neither names a subcontractor or an installer.

What the practitioner should take from this

The first point is the one the Combined Authority has put in writing itself, and it is worth dwelling on because it is unusual to see it stated so plainly on the face of a notice. A public body agreed to grant fund works to be carried out by somebody else on land the public body does not yet own, recognised that the grant might in law be a works contract rather than a grant, and chose to run the transaction under the procurement rules anyway. That is a decision about characterisation, and the characterisation is not settled by the label the parties put on the agreement. Anyone drafting a funding agreement where the funder is also the intended beneficiary of the completed asset should read this notice and ask the same question of their own arrangement before somebody else asks it for them.

The second point is who holds the construction contract. On the arrangement described, the operator procures the works and the Combined Authority funds them. The operator therefore sits between the funder and the contractor. That has consequences that only surface when something goes wrong: the funder has no direct contractual route to the contractor for defects, the operator carries the delivery risk on an asset it may not own for long, and any collateral warranty or third party rights provision becomes the only bridge between the paying party and the party doing the work. Where a depot is later sold to the funder, the position of the warranties on transfer is the question to settle at the outset.

The third point is the sequencing risk sitting inside the words currently negotiating purchase. The works are timed to start on 14 September 2026 and to finish in the middle of 2027. The depot purchases are not recorded as complete. Works programmed onto a site whose ownership is still being negotiated depend on access rights that are themselves contingent, and access is the commonest source of extension of time claims on fitting out and infrastructure work of this kind. The notices do not state what happens to the works, or to the funding, if a purchase does not complete.

The fourth point is the direct award. Both notices record the method as a direct award rather than a competition. A direct award is capable of being challenged, and the window for doing so is short. The published justification here rests on the operator's exclusive access to the depot and on the need for the works to be in place before franchised services start. Practitioners advising an unsuccessful potential bidder should note that the clock runs from the notice, not from the works starting on site.

No total for the two contracts is published by the Combined Authority, and none is stated here. No design information, no scope schedule and no start on site date beyond the contract start dates are published.