Contract award

Westminster signs a preconstruction contract for 144 homes at Harrow Road

By Staff Writer  |  02-09-2026

Westminster City Council has contracted Wates Construction Limited for preconstruction services, enabling works and main works at 291 Harrow Road, a 144 home development in three buildings. The contract was signed on 15 July 2026 at 2,542,020 pounds excluding value added tax and runs to 30 June 2027. The notice was published at 15:08 on 1 September 2026.

The gross figure on the notice is 3,050,424 pounds, exactly 1.2 times the net, so the notice carries value added tax at 20 per cent and nothing else. The contract is recorded as active and above threshold, and the procurement route is recorded as a competitive flexible procedure.

Read the figure carefully. It is the sum on a contract that ends in June 2027, on a scheme whose main works have not started, and the council states on its own notice that the values are estimates.

The scheme

The council's own description records that the project will deliver 144 new homes in the centre of London. Of those, 48 will be affordable homes, 24 will be adult social care units at social rent, and 72 will be available for private sale. The development is to comprise three buildings, at 15, 10 and five storeys.

On carbon, the description records an aim of reduction through passive design and a fabric first approach, with air source heat pumps and solar panels to make the most of renewable energy. The council states an aim of a 70 per cent sitewide reduction against the baseline for the proposed development, and records that as exceeding the Greater London Authority target of 35 per cent. Those are the council's stated aims on the notice, not measured outcomes.

The classifications on the notice are architectural, construction, engineering and inspection services, consultative engineering and construction services, and construction work for multi dwelling buildings and individual houses. Delivery is recorded against Westminster.

What the contractor has actually been asked to do first

The sequence is set out on the notice. The successful supplier is to undertake the preconstruction services before commencing enabling works and main works, and that is to follow the successful approval of the Gateway 2 application. Gateway 2 is the approval stage under the building safety regime that has to be cleared before construction work starts on a building caught by it. The notice does not state that this scheme is a higher risk building, and that is not assumed here; what the notice does state is that enabling works and main works follow the successful approval of the Gateway 2 application.

That is why the contract period ends on 30 June 2027 while the scheme itself plainly runs well beyond it. What has been signed is the front end. The council states in terms that the values of the works are estimates based on tendered values and known provisional sums, with the final values to be confirmed during the preconstruction services period.

So the 2,542,020 pounds is the published sum on the signed contract, not the cost of building 144 homes, and this article does not treat it as one. No scheme value appears anywhere on the notice and none is inferred here.

The measurement the council has written in

One entry on the notice is unusual enough to note. The contract carries an agreed metric titled project delivery and schedule performance, described as milestone completion rate and on time delivery percentage, observed monthly. A published key performance indicator on programme, reported every month through the preconstruction stage, gives the council a contemporaneous record of milestone performance before the main works ever start.

For anyone who later has to argue about delay on this scheme, that monthly record will exist and will have been agreed in advance. It is a great deal easier to run a programme argument from a series of monthly milestone returns than from a retrospective reconstruction, and it cuts both ways.

The notice publishes no form of contract, no count of tenderers, no runner up and no award criteria weightings, so nothing can be said here about the competition or about which standard form governs.