PUBLIC CONTRACT PROJECT : CASE HALMA GROUP
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CALL TO ACTION
For any UK public authority or private corporation currently engaged in or considering a long-term contract for life safety or medical technology systems, we invite you to participate in our proactive Contract Project. Our research shows that dominant suppliers like Halma plc often leverage their market power to impose unfair and restrictive terms, creating “contractual capture” that exposes your organisation to significant long-term financial and safety risks. Are your service agreements locking you into a single proprietary ecosystem with no possibility of using third-party support? Do your contracts contain punitive switching costs that make it impossible to seek alternatives? Are you facing a forthcoming tender process where the technical specifications seem tailored exclusively for Halma’s products, eliminating all other bids from the outset? These are not just unfavourable terms; they may be unlawful and unenforceable. The COCOO Contract Project offers a confidential review of your existing or proposed contracts to identify these hidden liabilities and develop a strategy to challenge them. We can help you renegotiate fairer terms, challenge specifications that restrict competition, and ensure your future procurement strategy is resilient, cost-effective, and safe. Do not wait until you are irreversibly locked in. Partner with us to restore your bargaining power and ensure your contracts serve the public interest, not the bottom line of a monopoly supplier.
UK TENDERS
Our core strategy will be to use the official procurement portals not just to find contracts, but to identify the points of maximum vulnerability in the public sector’s relationship with Halma. We will use Find a Tender for high-value opportunities and Contracts Finder for others, searching for keywords directly related to Halma’s product ecosystems, such as “life safety system maintenance,” “integrated fire alarm panels,” “ophthalmic diagnostic equipment for hospitals,” and “building-wide hazard detection.” Critically, we must also search for tenders that name Halma’s UK subsidiaries like “Apollo Fire Detectors,” “Advanced Electronics,” and “Keeler” either directly or by implication through proprietary technical specifications. We should focus our monitoring on Prior Information Notices and upcoming agreement pipelines, as these give us advance warning and the opportunity to influence the very design of a tender before it becomes locked down.
The unsolicited proposal we are developing should be framed as a “Procurement Risk and Market Sustainability Briefing” for public sector procurement managers. We will identify a specific high-value, long-term framework agreement for, perhaps, “Life Safety Systems for NHS Estates” that is due for renewal. Our proposal will not be a bid from COCOO, but an expert submission. It will use our extensive research to solve the public sector’s problem, which is often an unacknowledged over-reliance on a single dominant supplier. We will demonstrate how specifying a proprietary, single-vendor solution from Halma, while seemingly efficient in the short term, leads to significant long-term financial harm through inflated maintenance costs, forced upgrades, and a lack of innovation. We will also highlight the severe systemic safety risks involved, using the product recalls of SunTech and Crowcon as concrete examples of the danger of having no alternative suppliers for critical infrastructure.
Our proposed solution within the USP will be to offer our expertise to help the public body redraft its tender specifications to mandate open standards and interoperability. This is the key to breaking Halma’s proprietary lock-in. We will advise them on how to structure the tender into smaller, more specialised lots, allowing innovative small and medium-sized enterprises to compete for different components of the system, thereby fostering a more resilient and competitive supplier market. The information you provided about creating a non-cartel consortium of alternative suppliers is an excellent and legally sound strategy. We can use the supplier lists on existing CCS frameworks to identify these marginalised competitors and facilitate their collaboration on a joint bid, with COCOO providing the competition law guidance to ensure the arrangement is pro-competitive.
For ongoing opportunities, we should guide this new coalition of suppliers to apply to relevant Dynamic Purchasing Systems. A DPS is more flexible than a traditional framework and allows new suppliers to join at any time, providing a continuous route to market for smaller, innovative firms that may have been shut out of the larger, more rigid contracts dominated by Halma. By identifying a relevant DPS, for example, one for “Specialist Safety Solutions,” we can help our coalition gain a foothold in the public sector supply chain.
Each tender notice on the official portals will contain its own specific time limits for expressions of interest and final submissions. Our role will be to monitor these relentlessly and to act pre-emptively by using the intelligence to inform public bodies of the risks before they commit to another long-term, anti-competitive agreement. By using the system in this way, we are not just reacting to harms but are proactively reshaping the market to promote the sustainable, competitive, and safe outcomes that are the ultimate goal of our entire case.