London borough seeks legal and commercial advisers for £1-5m contract

The London Borough of Harrow is to hire legal and commercial advisers for a major project reviewing the shape of its resources functions.

As part of a drive for savings for 2015/16, Harrow is considering – under Project Minerva – its delivery options in respect of a number of work streams. These include:

  1. Finance;
  2. HR including Health and Safety;
  3. Payroll, Pensions & Contracts;
  4. Shared Services (AP, AR,SAP, Support);
  5. Revenues & Benefits including parking ticket administration and cashiers;
  6. IT;
  7. Business Transformation;
  8. Procurement;
  9. Facilities Management.

Delivery options under consideration include outsourcing, joining an existing shared service centre, partnering with other local authorities and/or transforming the current in house service delivery.

Harrow plans to conclude the options analysis and make a decision by December 2013 “to enable savings to be realised as soon as possible”.

The local authority is therefore looking to enter into a contract with a single prime adviser who will have contractual responsibility for managing all the elements of legal and commercial advice needed by the council on the options analysis, any procurement exercises, mobilisation and ongoing contract management.

“It does not expect one adviser necessarily to have all the necessary expertise and will therefore consider a bid from a primary adviser with a contractor/subcontractor relationship or other arrangement provided that this leads to a single contractual relationship with a single contractor who is responsible to the council for the performance of the services,” the council said.

Harrow added that it had no preference as to whether the prime adviser had expertise and experience in legal services or commercial services “although the anticipated value of the legal services element of the contract is greater than the anticipated value of the commercial services”.

The contract – which is estimated to be worth between £1m and £5m – will last ten years with the option to extend for up to a further five years. This is intended to cover the post contract support required under Project Minerva.

The council said it intended to invite up to five candidates to submit tenders on the basis of the order of ranking of candidates following the evaluation of the PQQ responses.

The successful tenderer will be expected to work closely with Harrow's in-house legal and financial teams.