Provision of Audio-Visual Equipment and Associated Services -Contract Variation

Description

The Authority require additional works that may increase the contract spend by up to £750,000, increasing the total contract value to £2,250,000. For technical reasons, these additional requirements have become necessary and were not included in the initial procurement. If the uplift in value does not go ahead, planned AV/VC upgrades will be delayed and the current technical operational issues with be unresolved until a new contract is awarded. A change of contractor at this time would cause significant inconvenience, including impact user experience, additional effort and costs, when the Authority is already working to establish a replacement contract at expiry. This is in compliance with Regulation 72 1 b of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.

Since the contract was awarded and post pandemic the way Defra Group works has changed and now involves increased use of MS Teams video calls to enable the required new ways of working. To support this Defra Group has begun to replace the older Cisco VC system with standard MS Teams rooms. This will resolve the unexpected interoperability issues, user problems and complaints encountered with what is known as the inter-op solution (using the old Cisco/ Poly hardware with MS Teams). The increased deployment of MS Teams rooms to meet the required demand will increase the spend beyond the £1.5m originally contracted within the initially contracted 2 year period.

This Call Off Contract is varied as follows:

• The existing Contract Value is £1,500,000. The Authority proposes to uplift the Contract value by an additional £750,000, increasing the overall Contract Value to a maximum of £2,250,000.

• The contract end date will remain the same 24/07/2024.

• This is the first variation to this contact.

This notice relates to the previous published notice for Provision of Audio-Visual Equipment and Associated Services Contract tender_286174/1091683.

A procurement project for the provision of Audio-Visual Equipment and Associated Services following the expiry of the current contract has commenced.