Fufilment Partner for Surge and Pandemic Response

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is inviting suppliers to participate in this pre-market engagement exercise to explore options for a fulfilment partner for surge and pandemic response. This engagement aims to share UKHSA’s current thinking, gather feedback from the market regarding the proposed specification, contract and tender evaluation methodology to inform the final approvals for the procurement strategy.

UKHSA is exploring the feasibility of establishing a flexible fulfilment service, which can be rapidly surged when required to support surge or pandemic response activity to provide greater resilience and flexibility across use cases as part of UKHSA's Pandemic Preparedness strategy and support the UK’s contribution to the 100 Days Mission, which targets deployment of diagnostics within 100 days of identifying a new pandemic threat.

Outside of incidents it is envisaged the service would operate as a low-volume capability a “cold state”, supporting routine activity during business-as-usual operations, this could include deliveries to care homes or other organisational and private settings. When activated by the Authority in defined circumstances, such as a pandemic declaration or surge response activation, the service would be required to scale rapidly and mobilise at pace into a “hot state”.

This is likely to require a high volume of dispatches in the hundreds of thousands per day, while maintaining full regulatory compliance, data integrity, security controls, and service quality. For certain test kits, the Supplier would be required to support outbound delivery to the end user or organisational endpoint (e.g. homes, care settings or other designated locations).

Once end users have taken their samples, they would return the test kits directly to laboratories designated by UKHSA for testing, rather than sending them back to the Supplier’s warehouse or fulfilment centres, the fulfilment partner will be responsible for making these arrangements in consultation with UKHSA. The intended route to market is via the GCA RM6354 Courier, Distribution, Storage and Specialist Solutions Framework Lot 2b Kitting, Fulfilment and Asset Management.

Please note, the indicative contract value below is for a “cold state” running of the contract and a hot state contract value will be many multiples of this. This engagement is exploratory and does not represent a commitment to procure at this stage.