A road reinstatement contractor for utility or highway schemes should be judged on four things: valid NRSWA street works qualifications for every operative and supervisor, demonstrable compliance with the Specification for the Reinstatement of Openings in Highways, the ability to self-deliver surfacing rather than subcontract it, and a reactive capability that can return to a failed reinstatement inside the guarantee period. Price matters, but it is the cheapest of those four to get wrong twice. Most of the cost of a bad appointment shows up 18 months later, in defect notices and repeat visits nobody budgeted for.
Reinstatement is the part of a utility scheme that outlives the scheme. The trench gets backfilled, the apparatus disappears, and what the highway authority inspects, samples and coring-tests for the next two or three years is the surface a contractor left behind. Procurement teams that treat reinstatement as a tail-end commodity tend to buy it that way, then discover the liability was never commoditised at all.
Under section 70 of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991, the duty to reinstate the street sits with the undertaker, not with whoever holds the trowel. Section 70 requires the undertaker to reinstate as soon as reasonably practicable, to complete an interim reinstatement permanently within six months, and to notify the street authority. Subcontracting the surfacing does not move that duty anywhere. It only adds a party between the client and the defect.
The guarantee periods are set by the Specification for the Reinstatement of Openings in Highways, commonly shortened to SROH. Two years is standard, and three years applies to deep openings where the cover over the apparatus exceeds 1.5 metres, with an exception where that depth occurs only intermittently over lengths under five metres. The clock starts on completion of the permanent reinstatement. Any contractor who cannot recite that distinction in a tender interview is unlikely to be pricing the remedial risk properly.
Failures rarely announce themselves. Cumulative settlement, a dropped joint, a surface that fails skid resistance testing on a bus route: these surface months after the crew has left, and the inspection regime is deliberately built to catch them. Sampling under SROH is random and the costs of a failed sample fall on the undertaker, so a client’s real exposure is not the reinstatement price but the probability of coming back.
The accreditations that matter, and the ones that are noise
Street works qualifications are the non-negotiable baseline. Every operative needs the relevant Street Works Qualifications Register units for the work they are doing, and there must be a qualified supervisor available to the site, not merely on the payroll. Ask to see cards with expiry dates rather than a policy statement, because the lapse rate on renewals across the industry is higher than most clients assume.
For surfacing on the strategic and principal road network, National Highways Sector Schemes are the meaningful signal. The relevant schemes cover laying of asphalt and the supply chain around it, and certification is audited against a documented quality system rather than self-declared. National Highways publishes the sector scheme certification requirements for contractors and subcontractors, and it is worth reading before writing a PQQ, if only to avoid asking for schemes that do not apply to your scheme type.
Then there is the second tier: ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001, Constructionline Gold, Achilles, CHAS. None of those prove a contractor can lay a good joint. What they do prove is that there is a management system behind the gangs, which is the thing that determines whether documentation, notices and as-built records arrive when the authority asks for them. For clients working on water networks, WIRS accreditation on the self-lay side tells you the same contractor can also do the excavation and connection work legitimately, which matters if you would rather not split the job.
Local knowledge is an accreditation of a different kind. Highway authorities interpret SROH within their own permit conditions, and inspection culture in, say, a London borough is not the culture in a Hertfordshire district. HAUC publishes the co-ordination and operational guidance the sector works to, and HAUC UK is where the advice notes that shape those local interpretations are issued.
Setting the selection criteria
Self-delivery deserves more weight in a scoring matrix than it usually gets, because it decides how fast a defect gets fixed and how much of that time is spent arguing. A contractor running its own gangs, rollers, planers and hot boxes can put a crew back on a failed joint within a day. A contractor that subcontracts surfacing has to buy its way into somebody else’s programme first, and the client waits while two commercial teams work out whose problem it is.
Among the road reinstatement contractors working across Hertfordshire and London, McFadden Utilities is one of the firms that self-delivers the full reinstatement sequence in house, covering backfill, tarmac reinstatement, white works, cold applied reinstatement, line painting and anti-skid under a single set of accreditations. The family-run Welwyn Garden City contractor has been trading since 1980 and carries 24/7 standby crews for its water company work, which is the practical test of reactive capability rather than a claim about it. Where the same business also excavates, the boundary between the dig and the finished surface stops being a place where responsibility gets lost.
Two further criteria are worth writing into the scoring. First, ask how interim reinstatements are tracked to permanent within the six-month window, and ask to see the register, because a contractor with no register has no system. Second, ask what proportion of last year’s reinstatements were resampled or served with a defect notice, expressed as a percentage of jobs rather than a count. Honest contractors will give you a number in the low single digits and explain the ones that failed.
Questions that separate tenders
Ask for the plant list and the directly employed headcount, not the organisation chart. Ask which elements are subcontracted by default and which only under peak load, and get the names of the subcontractors, because those firms will be on your site whether or not they appear in the tender. Ask how permit variations and overruns are handled commercially, since overrun charges are one of the few reinstatement costs that scale quickly and unpredictably.
Finally, ask what happens at 22 months. The answer tells you whether a contractor has thought about the guarantee period as a liability it owns or as a problem that expires. On utility and highway schemes, the firms worth appointing talk about the two years after the works with the same specificity as the two weeks during them.
