Under the new Regional Delivery Partnership arrangement, contractors will become delivery integration partners, designing and constructing motorway and major A-road projects across England under NEC4 standard terms, with suitable amendments.

Procurement chiefs estimate that the total spend with its new framework partners will be as high as £8.7bn over the period from 2018 to 2024.

The new approach to delivering the Roads Investment Strategy will focus on greater collaboration and a stronger regional procurement footprint for medium size projects.

Highways England procurement Director, Sharon Cuff said: “The new contract model we are launching today puts collaboration at the heart of the relationships necessary to deliver the Road Investment Strategy at the scale and pace required, and I urge all of the supply chain to engage.

“We want to be a client of choice in the sector, and recognise the important role our supply chain play in helping us to shape and innovate within our new procurement models defined under Routes to Market.”

The UK will be broken down into eight lots. These will be divided among five basic regions, with two bands of work streams – one  for packages below £100m and one for work exceeding this value.

This is intended to open the door to more regional players alongside the country’s big name contractors. Firms will only be allowed to secure two lots.

Two contractors will be chosen for most of the lots, with each package containing 1-2 named project schemes, to be delivered during the framework term.

Work on the two highest value lots in the east and north will be spread among three firms.

Highways England expects it new DIP contractors to contribute to planned national and regional Centres of Excellence to help drive innovation.

They will also help to establish a Sustainable Improvement Hub to develop and deliver a procurement pipeline, common regional supply chain, promote procurement execution and facilitate supplier relationship management in the regions in which they operate.

A second £300m procurement phase of the Regional Delivery Partnership procurement, to be issued in autumn and will support the development of route options using technical advisers as part of the Regional Delivery Partnership.

At the end of the year a new and separate model will be launched covering the delivery of the smart motorways programme that will continue to tackle congestion and help to make journey times more reliable.

Highways England will continue to engage with the supply chain in developing this new model to deliver smart motorways throughout 2018.

More information is available from the procurement portal.