Background

Working with Together Housing we recognised early on the important role that GSHP and, specifically, shared loop installs would play in helping landlords address fuel poverty and climate change across their stock. That’s why we were the first framework service provider to procure a social housing focused suite of GSHP frameworks. After supporting Together Housing Group to use this framework to successfully deliver a small pilot project of 120 units to test the solution, we were asked to help develop a procurement approach that allowed them to have ultimate control and visibility over the products used and the installation standards required – a traditional ‘contractor supply and install’ tender wouldn’t cut it here. We were able to run a procurement to identify which heat pump manufacturers were to be specified across a wide range of properties using a stringent performance based specification and evaluation process testing not only performance of the product and physical size of units but also the ongoing support available from manufacturers to Together Housing Group’s yet to be appointed installation contractor, their in house maintenance teams and ‘help desk’ staff as well as tenants on using their new heating systems

As this project needed to be contractor supply and fit so as to attract the lower rate of 5% VAT, we were also able to agree the commercial rates that manufacturers committed to supply to any installation contractor at. This process identified Kensa Heat Pumps and NIBE as the specified manufacturers of heat pumps up to 6kW output and over 6kW outputs respectively. By comparison, the installation mini competition process was more straight forward and, testing quality and cost on a 60 /40 split, Kensa Contracting were appointed as the most economically advantageous tenderer. Again, key considerations in the evaluation were how the contractor would work with Together staff and residents to ensure systems were handed over defect free and everyone knew how to operate them most efficiently and respond to service and maintenance queries.