Leon Walker,
Regen.net,
20 August 2008
Development: Procurement procedure will be re-run
A council in Greater Manchester will have to re-run its selection procedure for a developer for a regeneration programme following a European Court of Justice ruling last month.
Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council had selected Wilson Bowden as preferred developer for the town centre development following a tender process in 2007 through the European Union's OJEU procurement system.
But Rochdale's original OJEU notice did not contain information on the weighting that would be applied to the criteria on which applications would be judged, the council said.
A European Court of Justice ruling made on the 7 July 2008 concerning a Greek council's development project, ruled that the procedure should have included information of criteria weightings, according to the council.
A subsequent High Court ruling in England has upheld the judgement up and Rochdale council has now said it will now have to re-run the procurement procedure.
Alan Black, Director at DTZ, the council's commercial advisers described Rochdale's procurement procedure as: "Most thorough and transparent."
But Simon Danczuk, Rochdale's Labour parliamentary candidate, said: "They are trying to hide behind obscure Greek case law when the real reason is that they are legally bound to publish the criteria on which they judged the bids."
He added: "We've been saying for a long time that this is a farce. I fully expected the selection process to be re-run because it was a flawed procedure."
The change in schedule has delayed the retail element of the project by one month, the council said.
