Kingston is paying up to £300,000 for designs for an electric depot on a Jubilee Way car park site, to expand the SEND minibus fleet. Bids close 16 October.
Kingston Council wants to build an electric vehicle depot in Chessington for the minibuses that take children with special educational needs to school. It is looking for an architect to work up the design, and it will pay up to £300,000 for that alone.
The job is advertised in a tender notice published on Find a Tender on 18 September. Bids close at noon on Friday 16 October.
The notice is the first public description of the scheme. It names the site as “the car park site, Jubilee Way, Cox Lane, Chessington”, and gives the reason for building it in the council’s own words:
The Project is a major project to relocate the service from their current location to enable development and to allow for the required expansion of the fleet to deliver this key service.
Two things are packed into that sentence. The transport service is being moved off wherever it is now because something else is going to be built there. And the fleet is expected to grow.
What is actually being bought
Not a depot. Not yet.
The £300,000 buys architectural work up to and including RIBA stage 2, which is concept design. The council has already done stage 0 itself, and says so. It has produced capacity drawings, an initial cost estimate and a strategic brief, and these have “identified the site has potential to accommodate the needs of the user”.
What the architect’s work is for is set out plainly. It “will enable the Council to prepare a business case and make an informed decision on taking the project beyond feasibility”. There is an option to extend the appointment if the council decides to carry on.
So the council is spending up to £300,000, or £360,000 with VAT, to find out whether it should spend considerably more. That is normal for a capital project at this stage. It is also the point at which a scheme is easiest to stop.
The fleet this is being built for
The depot is for Achieving for Children, the community interest company that runs education and children’s social care for Kingston and Richmond. AfC operates the borough’s statutory SEND home to school transport.
The vehicles are not owned. They are leased, and the council has published what that costs.
In a contract award notice of 31 October 2025, Kingston recorded a two-year lease worth £1.3m excluding VAT for “specialist adapted minibuses to support statutory SEND transport across Kingston and Richmond”. The contract was concluded on 28 July 2025 with London Hire Ltd of Erith. One tender was received.
It was awarded without competition, under regulation 32(2)(b)(ii) of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, and the council explains why in the notice. The aim was to secure an interim contract with the existing provider, “ensuring continuity of service with minimal disruption to children, young people and their families while a wider transformation project of SEND Transport is completed in line with the Council’s climate strategy”.
That is the sentence that makes sense of the depot. The minibus lease was deliberately short and interim. The transformation project it was buying time for is still running, and a purpose-built electric depot is the part of it you can stand in.
What the notice does not say
Three fairly large things.
It does not say what development is displacing the service. The phrase is “to enable development”, with no further detail, and the notice does not name the depot’s current location.
It does not say how many vehicles are involved, now or after the expansion.
It does not say what the depot itself would cost. That is what the business case is for.
There is also no planning application. We searched the council’s planning register for Jubilee Way and Cox Lane on 23 September and found nothing for a depot at either. That is consistent with a project still at feasibility stage, and it means the point at which residents can formally comment has not arrived.
Nor is the site one of the ten car parks the council lists on its car parks page, so no public pay and display parking is at stake. Jubilee Way sits at the eastern end of Cox Lane in the KT9 1TR postcode, in the King George’s and Sunray ward, by King George’s Field.
How the bids will be judged
The contract is being let under the Procurement Act 2023 through an open procedure, so anyone meeting the conditions can bid. The council says it ran soft market engagement first. Small and medium-sized firms are explicitly eligible.
Bids are scored:
- Technical quality: 50%
- Price: 40%
- Social value: 10%
To get that far, bidders have to satisfy conditions of participation covering financial standing, insurance, health and safety, modern slavery, the living wage and a carbon reduction plan with an environmental management system.
The appointment is dated to run from 30 November 2026 to 30 June 2029.
What it means for you
If your child uses SEND transport in Kingston, nothing changes yet, and nothing in this notice suggests a change to the service itself. What it tells you is that the council expects to be carrying more children, and is planning the capacity rather than reacting to it later.
That expectation sits alongside this week’s Ofsted and CQC inspection of Kingston’s SEND services, which gave the partnership the best of three possible outcomes and told it to cut health waiting times. Transport was not one of the two areas for improvement.
If you live near Jubilee Way or Cox Lane, the useful thing is the sequence. A design contract is awarded around 30 November. A business case follows. Only after that would a planning application appear on the register, and that is the stage at which objections count. Our Kingston planning news page tracks new applications in the borough.
If you are an architect or a practice, the tender pack is on londontenders.org and the buyer contact is the council’s commissioning team at commissioning@kingston.gov.uk. Under the amended timetable, clarification questions close at noon on 1 October and answers are due by noon on 5 October.
One oddity worth recording: the notice’s own timetable line for contract signature reads “15th December 202”, with the year cut off. Every other date in it is complete.
Sources
- New EV Depot: Architectural Designer Services in connection with construction of a new EV depot for AfC SEND Transport, tender notice 088917-2026, The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, published 18 September 2026 under the Procurement Act 2023, reference DN799331. Source of the site, the £300,000 and £360,000 values, the RIBA stage 0 to 2 wording, the reason for relocation, the timetable, the award criteria, the conditions of participation, the contract period and the amendment extending the enquiry and tender deadlines.
- Provision of Leased Specialist Passenger Transport Vehicles for SEND Transport (Minibus Fleet), contract award notice 070090-2025, published 31 October 2025, for the £1.3m two-year minibus lease concluded on 28 July 2025 with London Hire Ltd, the single tender, the regulation 32 direct award and the reference to a wider SEND transport transformation project tied to the council’s climate strategy.
- Kingston planning register, searched for Jubilee Way and Cox Lane on 23 September 2026, for the absence of any planning application for a depot at the site.
- Car parks, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, for the list of ten council car parks, which does not include the Jubilee Way site.
- Postcode KT9 1TR checked against postcodes.io for the ward, and the King George’s Field Indoor Bowling Club address on Jubilee Way taken from the council’s own planning register.
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