IN Brief:
- The contracts could run for 15 years from April 2028 until March 2043.
- Five regional lots cover Orbit homes across the Midlands, East, South East, and South.
- The programme combines component investment, decarbonisation, remediation, and complex design and construction work.
Orbit has opened procurement for a planned investment, remediation, and major projects programme with an estimated maximum value of £1.4352bn across its housing stock in the Midlands, East, South East, and South of England.
The housing association intends to appoint contractors across five regional lots under agreements that could run for 15 years. Each contract would begin with a five-year term and include two possible five-year extensions, taking the maximum period from 1 April 2028 to 31 March 2043.
The work combines routine component replacement with more demanding building safety and design and construction activity. Planned packages include kitchens, bathrooms, windows, doors, compliance equipment, and other improvements triggered by component age, condition, or Orbit’s investment programmes.
Decarbonisation is included within the scope, allowing energy-efficiency measures to be commissioned alongside conventional planned maintenance. The notice does not prescribe a single retrofit specification, but it gives Orbit a route to combine fabric, services, and component work through the same regional delivery structure.
Remediation forms a separate strand. Contractors may be required to investigate, design, advise on, manage, and deliver work addressing fire-safety risks, structural defects, and other building conditions, with compliance obligations running through survey, design, construction, and handover.
Major projects will bring those workstreams together where estates or occupied buildings require more complex investigation, coordination, planning, or temporary measures. Access, resident communication, sequencing, and information management will therefore carry as much weight as the physical replacement of components.
The five lots cover Stratford and the South Midlands, the Central and East Midlands, East Anglia, Erith and North Kent, and the South Coast. Published indicative values range from £200m for East Anglia to £400m for the Central and East Midlands, with the other regions valued at about £250m to £300m.
Orbit is using a competitive flexible procedure under the Procurement Act 2023. It expects initially to shortlist the seven highest-scoring bidders for each lot before progressing through initial tenders, dialogue or negotiation, final tenders, and bidder presentations.
Quality is expected to account for 60% of the evaluation score, with price carrying 40%. That weighting gives mobilisation, resident service, technical delivery, programme control, safety, social value, and data quality substantial influence over the result rather than reducing the exercise to a long-term rates contest.
Suppliers may compete for more than one region, although Orbit normally intends to restrict each successful bidder to a single lot. The landlord has retained discretion to relax that rule where competition is weak or one bidder achieves a materially stronger score.
The structure should create a group of regional delivery partners rather than a single national contractor. It reduces concentration risk, but it also leaves Orbit responsible for maintaining common technical standards, reporting systems, resident processes, and performance measures across five contracts and several work types.
A potential 15-year term gives successful contractors a long operating horizon, although the agreements include a 12-month termination-for-convenience provision. The headline value is therefore a ceiling across the programme, not a guaranteed allocation to the appointed suppliers.
Longer contracts can support investment in directly employed teams, regional subcontractor networks, surveying capability, digital records, training, and resident liaison. Repeated programmes also allow components and installation methods to be standardised, reducing mobilisation costs and improving the consistency of information returned to the asset owner.
The same duration exposes the contracts to changes in material prices, building regulations, decarbonisation standards, and labour availability. Indexation, change control, open-book mechanisms, and performance reviews will need to accommodate those shifts without dissolving the commercial discipline established through competition.
The programme enters a housing-maintenance market already carrying heavier demands from building safety, damp and mould, energy performance, stock condition, and statutory compliance. Combining planned investment with remediation may simplify procurement, but it increases the need for reliable surveys and clear scopes before work reaches site.
Expressions of interest opened on 4 August and close on 3 September 2026. Orbit therefore has more than a year to complete the competition, dialogue, award, mobilisation, and transition before the regional contracts are due to start in April 2028.
The winning bidders will not secure a single immediate project. They will gain access to a broad and repeatable programme whose value will depend on annual budgets, asset condition, regulatory priorities, and performance over a period potentially extending into the 2040s.
