When it will announce the outcome of the tendering exercise for the maintenance of trunk roads.

Tenders for the competition for the four units were received by the Scottish Executive on 30 October and have subsequently been assessed. I can today announce the intention to award four new contracts worth £350 million over five years from 1 April 2001. Subject to completion of an urgent independent review of one aspect of the assessment process which has featured prominently in recent proceedings in the Court of Session, i.e. the use of tender assessment quantities, the contracts will be awarded to BEAR Scotland Limited for the North East and North West Units and to AMEY Highways Ltd for the South East and South West Units. The companies involved already have a substantial record of successful provision of trunk road maintenance in England and Scotland.The review will be undertaken by Halcrow, in association with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. I expect it to take no more than seven days, and I am confident that that it will confirm that the processes followed in assessing quantities were both fair and reasonable. The contracts will be awarded when the review is complete, but the new companies will only take over responsibility on the roads on 1 April. The intervening period will be spent in the essential work of developing plans and systems and procuring the necessary plant, depots and staff required to carry out the work.Under the terms of the competition, the new companies are responsible for any obligations for staff which arise under TUPE. We expect TUPE to apply.It is customary to publish in the Official Journal of the European Community details of the outcome of public sector competitions. In the case of these competitions each bidder was required to demonstrate that their proposals for the contract would meet a quality benchmark. Each bidder satisfied that requirement and therefore an assessment of the rates and prices quoted was made against a predetermined volume of work and subjected to a number of sensitivity tests to provide an overall comparative cost for each tender. The names of each bidder for each competition are set out below, in alphabetical order, and the overall comparative costs of the tenders received for the five-year core duration of each contract are set out in numerically increasing order. The actual value of the contracts over this period will depend on the volume of work ordered within each unit.North West UnitBids were received from the following contractors:AccordBEAR Scotland Ltd (Babtie Group Ltd, Enstone Thistle Ltd and Ringway Group Ltd)Caledonian Roads (Local Authority Consortium)Link Roads (Balfour Beatty and Mott MacDonald)The assessed overall comparative costs of tenders were:£104,975,174 £124,136,868£168,190,613£180,013,104North East UnitBids were received from the following tenderers:ACTim(Atkins, Carillion and Thorburn Colquhoun)BEAR Scotland LtdNE Roads (Colas)Neulink (Local Authority Consortium PPP with Mouchel)The overall comparative costs of the tenders are:£75,822,374£91,371,288£93,439,545£100,095,522South East UnitBids were received from the following tenderers:ACTimAMEY Highways LtdLowland Roads (Local Authority Consortium)Total Road Care (Morrison and Mouchel)The overall comparative costs of tender are:£56,013,419£91,628,894£95,167,760£96,474,835South West UnitBids were received from the following tenderers:AMEY Highways LtdClyde Solway (Local Authority Consortium)Link RoadsNuttallThe overall comparative costs of tender are:£99,953,997£150,137,513£164,307,240£225,283,948