Contract award

Crawley extends quantity surveying consultancy to 2030 without competition

By Staff Writer  |  03-09-2026

Crawley Borough Council has extended its quantity surveying consultancy services to March 2030 without a fresh competition, awarding the continuation to Keegans Limited at 1,000,000 pounds excluding value added tax. The contract was concluded on 21 August 2026 and the award notice was published at 16:31 on 2 September 2026.

The procedure is recorded as negotiated without a prior call for competition, on the ground of new works or services constituting a repetition of existing works or services. That ground allows a buyer to go back to the incumbent for more of the same rather than advertise, and it is the ground the council has relied on here. The council gave this explanation on the face of the notice:

There has been a significant increased demand for specialist professional services due to the scale and complexity of the Council's capital projects, enhanced regulatory requirements within the social housing sector, and the delivery of decarbonisation and retrofit programmes.

Crawley Borough Council, contract award notice

Three drivers are named and all three are recent: the size of the capital programme, the tightening of social housing regulation, and retrofit delivery. The council says demand outgrew the arrangement it had.

What was awarded

The description of the procurement is the continuation of partnering consultancy services for quantity surveying. The main classification is construction consultancy services and the additional classification is building surveying services, so the appointment is not confined to cost work in the narrow sense. Place of performance is Crawley, West Sussex. No lots are used and no options are recorded.

Keegans Limited is recorded on the notice at Frodsham, with company number 04547050, and is recorded as not being a small or medium sized enterprise. The total value of the procurement and the total value of the contract are each given as 1,000,000 pounds excluding value added tax. Neither an annual figure nor a rate is published, so what the sum buys in hours or in schemes is not on the record.

The commercial point

The value is the ceiling for the extension, not a commitment, and it runs to March 2030. That is a little over three and a half years from the date the contract was concluded. A consultancy appointment carried on that basis has two features a competing firm will notice.

The first is that the work is being bought on the same terms as before. A repetition award does not reopen rates, scope or the allocation of risk; it continues an existing arrangement. Whatever the original partnering terms say about deliverables, liability and the standard of care now governs a programme the council itself describes as larger and more complex than the one those terms were written for.

The second is exposure. The named drivers, capital programme scale, social housing regulation and retrofit, are the areas where cost advice tends to be examined afterwards. Retrofit and decarbonisation schemes carry provisional sums, unknown existing conditions and grant funded deadlines. Social housing regulation brings survey and evidence obligations that fall on the same professional team. The consultancy that carries all three is carrying correlated risk, not diversified risk.

What is not published

The notice does not identify the contract under which the original appointment was made, and does not give its value or its expiry date, so the size of the extension relative to the original cannot be worked out from the record. It publishes no scope schedule, no rates, no performance mechanism, and no break provision. It records that the procurement is covered by the Government Procurement Agreement, and gives the Royal Courts of Justice as the review body. The council is recorded on the notice as having no organisation identifier on any register, and the procurement contact given is an email address in the horsham.gov.uk domain.