The relationships between government suppliers and government departments have been blurring for years but the General Dynamics Specialist Vehicle Recce Block 1 Scout announcement this week has raised even more questions about these types of arrangement.
The Defence Support Group (DSG) is a UK Government Trading Fund owned by the Secretary of State for Defence formed out f merger between ABRO and DARA.
On the 9th of February this year General Dynamics and DSG signed a partnering agreement that would see a substantial amount of work on the FRES Specialist Vehicle programme being carried out at DSG’s Donnington site.
Welcoming the selection of General Dynamics as the preferred bidder for the £200 million assessment phase, DSG’s Chief Executive, Archie Hughes, said
The decision to begin work on this vital piece of military equipment is an important one, which helps secure workloads for the employees at our Donnington site in the West Midlands
One can feel some sympathy with those in the BAe camp, a private sector organisation through and through, who might feel somewhat aggrieved at losing to a partnership that includes the very people they are supposed to be selling to.
Does this strike anyone as wrong?
hey…hate to take your blog in a different direction but i don’t understand something here.
i thought the LPPV program was the more urgent of the two? why haven’t we heard any announcement on that yet?
Its a good point Solomon, I expect the announcement is pretty soon but at a guess, I would say the reason Scout was announced so soon was because of the imminent election in the UK. Once announced all major public departments have to go into something called ‘purdah’ which means many things but in this case, no big deals. The LPPV is equally urgent but is being procured under something called an Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) which because of its urgent nature does not fall into the same category as a major planned equipment programme contract