Feature
Oxford charging forward with their EV infrastructure procurement platform By AQN editor Paul Day
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s arguably the leading local authority in the drive towards ridding their streets of the internal combustion engine, it is not surprising that Oxford City Council have been the trailblazers of EV infrastructure procurement. This trailblazing journey began when The Go Ultra Low Cities scheme was launched in 2017. The idea was to create a cohort of eight exemplar cities or regions that lead the way in promoting electric vehicles, tackling air quality, and reducing carbon emissions. The Go Ultra Low Cities were Oxford, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, York, Dundee, London, the West of England, and the North East. As a result of the research undertaken here, at the vanguard of EV infrastructure, the Oxford team decided to enshrine their achievements in the ‘Oxford City Council Electric Vehicle Dynamic Purchasing System’ (DPS), a free resource designed to enable the public sector to side-step some of the problems they might otherwise encounter in building an effective EV infrastructure. Local authorities face a confusing environment, with a multitude of technical solutions, installation methods, and regulatory and statutory standards to wade through, as well as a similarly
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daunting number of companies offering their services. The situation for confused LAs is made worse by an increasing sense of urgency to get the appropriate infrastructure in place, given the national target of at least 300,000 charge points by 2030. It was into this landscape that Oxford City Council would launch their DPS. Mish Tullar, Director of Corporate Services at the Council explains, ‘It became apparent we needed a new approach that had longevity. We set up a team of internal procurement specialists, internal EV technical and implementation experts, and external EV legal experts: the architects of the DPS.’ Work on the DPS started in May 2020 and it was first put to use in November 2021, procuring consultants to help the team write Oxford’s EV infrastructure strategy: ‘Procurement started and took less than two months from writing the tender to the consultants starting work,’ says Mish. ‘It was at this point other local authorities started meeting with us to see if they could make use of it.’ Mish says,: ‘From our conversations with other local authorities, many were concerned they had neither the expertise nor the resource to procure quality EV infrastructure.
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‘They tend to get lots of mixed-quality responses to tenders – sometimes just a brochure – which makes evaluation difficult and resource intensive. Others experienced failed procurements or suppliers that did not deliver the quality and value for money they had hoped.’ To examine the other side of the coin, the Oxford team also listened to the perspective of the suppliers: ‘Their feedback was that public sector tenders are often resource intensive,’ says Mish, ‘Many suppliers find confusing criteria and requirements frustrating. This means it is mostly large companies with resource that respond to tenders. And in some cases, it leads to application costs being passed onto the purchaser.’ The project was overseen by the council’s director of corporate services and finance director and was made up of three working groups: the council’s procurement team, EV specialists in the council’s sustainable innovation team and external experts in contract and EV law. The DPS is a user guide and process flow, complete with contract and templates, to ensure any public sector organisation could use it with confidence. It has been designed to be particularly beneficial for local authorities without staff designated to EV infrastructure
