Foreign Office to overhaul its estate procurement

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is to overhaul its procurement methods in order to push ahead with upgrading its estate around the world.

As part of the changes, the department will appoint a contractor next month to act as its strategic partner on some of its major projects and to standardise its supply chains. It will also shake up its framework arrangements with consultants after criticism from architects.

The appointment of a strategic partner should put two delayed embassy projects back on track.

The schemes, in Warsaw, Poland, and Colombo, Sri Lanka, have been on hold since the start of the year while the FCO worked with the Office of Government Commerce on a procurement route.

The Warsaw scheme, designed by Tony Fretton Architects and worth about £15m, and the Colombo embassy, designed by Richard Murphy Architects, had already been delayed because of the bombing of the British consulate in Istanbul in November 2003. After the attack, the FCO was forced to undertake a security review of all its estate.

A source close to the Warsaw scheme said the appointment next month would mean that the embassies could begin to roll forward.

The source said: “There’s been a setting-up period, and the nature of the work that follows couldn’t be worked out until the procurement process was sorted out. This should unlock it.”

The FCO is also set to look again at some of its consultant framework arrangements after architects complained about not getting enough work.

The FCO put out a tender three years ago suggesting there was £100m of work to be done on the estate. Although some on the framework, such as TPS Consult and architect GMW, have picked up small-scale work, others – such as architect HOK – have won very little.

The FCO is now believed to favour design competitions for individual embassy projects rather than a framework.

One consultant on the framework admitted: “The framework didn’t quite measure up to our hopes and expectations.”