The Midlands Highway Alliance (MHA) has announced the four suppliers who have been successful with their bids for its new professional services framework, which could be worth up to £70m over four years.

The two successful bidders for Lot 1 (professional services) are AECOM and Amey Consulting, and for Lot2 (secondments) Matchtech and Waterman. The four have been chosen for the Professional Services Partnership (PSP3) framework to ensure its membership of 21 local authority authorities in and around the Midlands, including Leicestershire County Council, have easy and economical access to consultancy services.

Mike Ashworth, chair of the MHA, said: “I am delighted that after a thorough and inclusive tender exercise to announce the successful consultancies to work with member authorities across the Midlands Highways Alliance area. The new arrangements will come into operation on 29 April 2019 to mark the end of the PSP2 framework on 28 April 2019.”

Rory Poole, Head of Highways, AECOM, said: “This is an important new win for AECOM and builds on the success of the previous framework, through which we delivered a range of multidisciplinary projects for councils in the Midlands. We look forward to continuing our work with the MHA to help its members deliver schemes that will provide real benefits to communities across the region.”

A number of consultants expressed an interest and a total of ten bids were received by the return date. The tenders were assessed by staff across the alliance taking into account both price and quality in the process.

PSP3 will replace the current single supplier framework, Professional Services Partnership 2 (PSP2) which was awarded to AECOM back in April 2015 and has been very successful in delivering nearly £61m of engineering, environmental, planning and design services in its four-year tenure.

The new framework will be available to all members of the MHA, offering design services and secondments whilst also giving the opportunity for collaborative working with other authorities, benchmarking, and sharing best practice.