Appointment

Bond Bryan appointed design team for Lewisham College refurbishment

By Staff Writer  |  20 August 2026

NCG has appointed Bond Bryan Architects Limited as design team for the Lea House refurbishment at Lewisham College under a consultancy contract valued at 405,344 pounds. The contract was signed on 15 July 2026 and the award notice was published on the official tender service at 3:54pm on 19 August 2026.

The notice describes the appointment as a consultancy contract for a design team for the Lea House Construction project at Lewisham College, and records the place of performance as Lewisham College and remote. The classification applied is building consultancy services. Bond Bryan Architects Limited is recorded at an address in Sheffield and is recorded as a small or medium sized enterprise.

The contract was placed by direct award. The notice records the procedure as an award without prior publication of a call for competition, made under a professional services framework, and states that the contracting authority undertook a direct award and appointed the supplier in accordance with the framework's call-off mechanisms and award methodology.

One tender was received. It came from a small or medium sized enterprise and was submitted electronically. The stated award criterion is price. The notice records the justification for the absence of a call for competition under the classification for procurement falling outside the scope of application of the directive, and adds that the framework agreement itself was established following a competitive procurement procedure under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.

NCG is recorded as a body governed by public law with its main activity given as education, at Rye Hill House, Rye Hill Campus, Scotswood Road, Newcastle upon Tyne. The High Court of Justice is named as the review body.

What the practitioner should take from this

The first thing to understand about this notice is that a direct award is not the same as an uncompeted award, and the notice is careful to say so. The competition took place when the framework was established. What happened in July was a call off under rules the framework already contained. The single tender recorded is therefore the arithmetic of a direct award rather than evidence that nobody else wanted the work. Anyone reading a run of these notices should treat the tender count as describing the call-off stage only.

The second point is that direct award is a permission and not an obligation, and the framework's own rules decide when it may be used. Most professional services frameworks distinguish between direct award and further competition by reference to whether the requirement can be specified with sufficient precision to allow the terms to be fixed without reopening. Where a client relies on direct award, the documents that matter are the framework's call-off procedure and the record of how the selection was justified. A notice that names the framework, states that direct award is permitted and states that the mechanisms were followed is doing exactly what the publication rules ask of it.

The third point is the scope. Appointing a single design team, rather than separate consultants under separate appointments, concentrates coordination in one place. On a refurbishment that has real value, because the design risks that matter are the ones that appear at the interfaces between disciplines when an existing building is opened up. The corresponding exposure is that the client's remedies for a coordination failure sit against one covenant, and the professional indemnity position of that single appointment therefore deserves closer attention than it would if the risk were spread.

The fourth point is a practical one about place of performance. Recording the location as the college and remote is now common on consultancy notices and it is a fair description of how design teams work. It also has a contractual edge: where a schedule of services assumes a level of attendance on site, an appointment that contemplates remote working should say what attendance is included and what is additional. Inspection duties during a refurbishment are the usual flashpoint, because what is included is often assumed rather than written.

The fifth point is that the buyer sits several hundred miles from the project. A college group in Newcastle upon Tyne is procuring design services for a building in south east London. That is unremarkable for a national group, but it is a reminder to check which entity is the client under the appointment and against whom the consultant's obligations run.

No programme, construction value or RIBA stage split is published in the notice, and none is stated here.