Metronet Rail to tender 84 contracts

Metronet Rail is to competitively tender a total of 84 London Underground station upgrade contracts as part of its civils upgrade programme this year.

The move to put out work competitively, rather than deliver it via the consortium's own supply chain Trans4m, follows severe criticism of its performance on the London Underground Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the annual report of the independent PPP Arbiter last year.

The winners of the first of six station upgrade contracts, which are worth a combined £150m, were announced this week.

The four contractors are Taylor Woodrow (Baker Street station); Costain (Embankment station); Cleshar Contract Services (Moor Park station/Rickmansworth station); and YJL Infrastructure (Sloane Square station/Westbourne Park station).

A further 78 station upgrade contracts are in the pipeline. These will be let either as D&B contracts or bundled together into contract management packages.

Part of Metronet's civils upgrade programme will also be put out to competitive tender in May this year. A Metronet spokeswoman declined to give a value for the work, but industry observers said the station upgrades alone could be worth £1.4bn.

Industry sources said the scale of the transfer of work out of Metronet's supply chain indi-cates how poorly Metronet has performed.

"This is a significant amount of work being outsourced, but Metronet is under pressure to deliver now and no matter how much it improves it can't do it alone," said one civils contractor.