UK Public Sector Contracts & Tenders

NW3168 - Project Risk Tool Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL) provide water and sewerage services to just under 4.4 million people operating principally in the North-East of England, Essex, and Suffolk. It is NWL's vision 'to be the most digital water company in the world'. Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) is a large and diverse organisation which employs a varied set of processes to achieve its business outcomes. Our organisation is entering a period of increasing scale and complexity, and our current Excel‑based approach creates challenges with consistency, auditability, quantitative analysis, and real‑time visibility. To address these issues, NWL intends to procure a centralised Risk Management Tool that reflects our business, functional and non‑functional requirements. Our ambition is to embed a consistent minimum standard for risk and opportunity management across all levels of the organisation, while maintaining flexibility to support differing risk types, project complexities and operational environments. The new solution must allow NWL to manage risk at project, programme, and portfolio level with configurable hierarchies, strong governance controls, audit trails, validation rules, automated workflows, and clear ownership and accountability. The tool must support qualitative and quantitative analysis, including interaction with Monte‑Carlo simulation to enable QSRA/QCRA, ensuring NWL can reduce reliance on external consultants and improve the agility of in‑house modelling. It must also support configurable scoring, heatmaps, pre‑ and post‑mitigation views, dependencies, assumptions, exclusions, and risk and opportunity management across all levels of hierarchy. As the solution will be used by a wide and diverse user base, it must provide an intuitive, user‑friendly interface that can be easily navigated and adopted, with accessibility‑aligned design, strong searchability, a training/sandpit area, and clear help and guidance materials. It must also support controlled access for external users (e.g., contractors) and role‑based permissions to ensure secure collaboration. To meet NWL's operational and digital integration expectations, the system must offer open API‑based links to corporate platforms including (but not limited to) O365/Power BI, Active Directory, Oracle Fusion, and other related systems. Bulk uploads, automated data exchange, scheduling of tasks, notifications, escalations, and workflow automation are essential to improving efficiency and reducing manual effort across risk management activities. The solution must be scalable to support 1,000 active projects, with capacity for at least 500 risks per project and a minimum of 500 concurrent users, ensuring sustainability as NWL grows. Auditability, resilience, data retention, lifecycle management, and the ability to retain historical risk information for lessons learned and long‑term organisational insight are critical requirements. Suppliers should be able to demonstrate strong hierarchy management, workflow capability, governance controls, reporting and dashboarding, including automated distribution, heatmaps, drill‑down and drill‑up views, and flexible output formats for audit and assurance purposes. Solutions that offer high configurability, strong training support, sandpit environments, and effective licence models are considered strong candidates based on market assessment. Initial contract term 5 years. NWL intends to award a contract aligned to a 5+3+3 model (up to 11 years in total). Implementation is expected to begin in December 2027, following contract award, with a planned go‑live in January - March 2027. Future phases may introduce additional capability dependent on business priorities. Target Contract start date 02/11/2026.

Our intention is to outsource annually, from 2027, on a commission basis, circa £10 million (per annum) of unrecovered closed account water debt where a collect, or trace and collect solution is required. In addition to this we intend to outsource circa £4.5 million (per annum) of Post-Litigated (with County Court Judgement) water debt. Similar projections are foreseen for the duration of the agreement. We are offering an initial 3 year contract (1st February 2027 - 31st January 2030) with the possibility of two further extensions of 3 years each. There will be 4 different lots, and we wish to have a framework agreement with two vendors added to each lot. The lots will be: NW3089A - Post-litigation - County Court Judgment NW3089B - Closed Account (Prime) - forwarding address provided NW3089C - Trace and Collect, 1st placement NW3089D - Trace and Collect, 2nd placement We would invite parties to bid for all or part of this work. Framework contract specifics Batches would be issued throughout the year to the successful processor(s), with approximate yearly numbers being 6,000 Post-litigation - County Court Judgement 13,500 Closed Account (Prime) - forwarding address provided 9,000 Trace and Collect, 1st placement 22,000 Trace and Collect, 2nd placement (including 2nd placement Prime as T&C) It is proposed the accounts will commence being released to the processor in early 2027. Potential bidders will be required to comply with our standard Service Level Agreement, Data Processing agreement and to submit their Data Journey (examples on request) in order to show satisfaction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2018 We intend to appoint 2 x DCAs per debt segment; with cases initially split on a 50/50 basis with the option to place a larger or smaller proportion based on performance as the contract progresses. Interested parties (known as the Processor) must demonstrate: • FCA Authorisation • Background of dealing with utility debt on a bulk basis • Knowledge of the Water Industry and Ofwat Paying Fair Guidelines • Willingness to submit references and current success rates regarding existing bulk customers • Meet the requirements of Northumbrian Water's Risk Register • The ability to produce an accurate recording of success rate on demand with clear analysis and breakdown of payments in full, arrangements, and return rates to the client • A proactive approach with the client to reach successful resolution, quickly identifying trends through frequent analysis and offering improvements • Ability to provide any data of added value including new occupancy data to the client within 5 working days of identification • Ability to comply with our purchasing policies (details upon request) Interested parties should also be able to demonstrate: • A back-office organisation able to support our customers with instalment payment facilities and facilitate the maintenance of payment arrangements with varying payment methods • You must as a minimum offer the following payment methods: o Direct debit and/or Continuous payment authority o Online o Card Payment (via phone) o Other options such as Standing Order, Bank Transfer, Paypoint and Post office would be appreciated o Note all card payments must be Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant • A wide range of opening hours and support of suitably trained agents to resolve customer and client enquiries. • An appropriate vulnerability policy with particular reference to customer mental health issues and identification of financial struggles • Ability to offer bespoke support services to and identify customers that would benefit from being on our Priority Services Register such as: Mental health Dementia Literacy Problems / Learning Disability Unable to communicate in English Developmental Condition Supported Living Blind Partially Sighted Chronic/Serious illness Elderly Medical Dependency We would not knowingly outsource customers in the above categories, but should they be identified we would expect them to receive bespoke services • Adherence to the Debt Respite Scheme (Breathing Space Moratorium and Mental Health Crisis Moratorium) (England and Wales) Regulations 2020 • Ability to recognise and report on trends and changes to the rate of return on a frequent basis. • Client visibility of day-to-day working activity and communication between client and processor, relaying up to date customer contact, information, and activity in real time. • As part of onboarding a visit to the operational site dealing with the work will be required plus ongoing auditing visits. Vendors will be expected to support this requirement. • A clear and timely invoicing strategy and incoming payments on a weekly/monthly basis.