Carillion faces Equitix for £112m Cambridgeshire BSF

Balfour Beatty has been knocked out in the fight for the £112m Cambridgeshire County Council’s Fenland Building Schools for the Future scheme, leaving Carillion and Equitix to battle it out.

Both firms have been shortlisted for the Wave Four scheme will see six new secondary schools built in the Fenland area of Cambridgeshire. The six schools include one PFI school, a special school and an exclusion unit. Further schemes are planned in later waves under the BSF programme.

Carillion and Equitix will now work up final bids on two sample schemes. The final bids will be submitted in the late summer. A preferred bidder will be chosen in October.
Alan Kippax, Cambridgeshire BSF project director said he was impressed by the quality of all the initial bids. “It was not an easy task and all parties put in a huge amount of work. But that is the nature of the process,” he added.

Equitix has already clashed with Balfour Beatty, beating it to the £750m Derbyshire County Council BSF scheme in December last year. The Equitix consortium which includes Bowmer & Kirkland and GF Tomlinson, will deliver six new schools in Derbyshire in the first £80m phase, including two PFI schools.
 
Equitix is a relative newcomer to the education sector. The investment house has a portfolio of PFI/PPP deals in healthcare but has set its sights on the education, social housing, criminal justice, highways and Government accommodation PFI/PPP sectors.

However it faces a formidable opponent in Carillion which has so far won four BSF deals at South Tyneside and Gateshead, Nottingham, Tameside and Durham, totalling more than £1.4bn.