Contract award
East Sussex publishes three school and office works awards
By Staff Writer | 20 August 2026
East Sussex County Council published three contract award notices for property works within a two hour window on the afternoon of 19 August 2026. Two are roofing contracts at schools and the third is a replacement access ramp at a council building in Lewes. The three published values are 286,234 pounds, 97,291 pounds and 70,026 pounds.
The largest is roofing works at Heathfield Community College, awarded to Clarke Roofing (Southern) Limited at 286,234 pounds. That notice was published at 2:54pm and records the contract as signed on 26 May 2026. Five tenders were received, all five from small or medium sized enterprises, and all five were submitted electronically.
The second, published at 3:22pm, is roof replacement works at Hankham Primary, also awarded to Clarke Roofing (Southern) Limited, at 70,026 pounds, with the contract recorded as signed on 18 May 2026. Four tenders were received, all four from small or medium sized enterprises. That notice is the only one of the three to record an option, and it is stated in plain terms: if timescales slip then the programme of works may need to extend.
The third, published at 2:37pm, is a replacement ramp at Sackville House in Lewes, described in the notice as a DDA replacement ramp. It was awarded to JG and JR Landgridge Limited at 97,291 pounds and the contract is recorded as signed on 20 April 2026. Five tenders were received, all from small or medium sized enterprises.
All three are classified simply as construction work and all three were procured in the same way. Each notice records the procedure as a mini-competition under a framework lot established under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, with price as the stated award criterion. Clarke Roofing (Southern) Limited is recorded at an address in Hailsham and JG and JR Landgridge Limited at an address in Hove, and both are recorded as small or medium sized enterprises. The three published figures total 453,551 pounds.
What the practitioner should take from this
The interval between signature and publication is the point that carries most weight for anyone using the transparency data as a market indicator. The ramp contract was signed on 20 April 2026, the Hankham roof on 18 May 2026 and the Heathfield roof on 26 May 2026. All three appeared on the same afternoon on 19 August 2026, between three and four months after the works were placed. Award notices are subject to publication time limits, so a batch of three appearing together, months after signature, is worth noting by anyone who assumes that an absence of notices means an absence of spend. It usually means an absence of publication.
The second point is the option recorded on the Hankham notice. Stating that the programme may need to extend if timescales slip is unusually candid drafting for a public notice, and it is a sensible thing to have declared. Where an authority foresees that a works programme may run longer than the period originally advertised, saying so in the notice protects the position: an extension exercised within a declared option is a different thing from a modification agreed after the event. School roofing is the obvious case, because the work is usually planned around holiday possessions and a slipped start can push a package into the next available window rather than merely a few weeks later.
The third point concerns the award criterion. All three notices record price as the criterion, which is normal for a mini-competition under a framework lot: quality has already been assessed at the point suppliers were admitted to the framework, and the second stage tests rate rather than capability. The practical consequence is that the quality of the outcome depends on the specification, because that is the only variable left. On a roof replacement, the specification is doing the work that a quality score would otherwise do, and the same contractor winning both roofing packages on price says nothing adverse about either competition.
The fourth point is scale. Three packages of between 70,000 pounds and 290,000 pounds, all placed with local firms in Hailsham and Hove, is what the maintenance side of a county council's property programme actually looks like. It is also a reminder that a single authority's published works spend arrives in many small notices rather than in a few large ones.
No programme dates, completion dates or framework names are published in the three notices, and none is stated here.