A support contract worth an estimated £39 million is being lined up to keep the equipment Britain uses to detect chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats in working order, according to a pipeline notice published by Defence Equipment and Support.
The notice is an advance warning rather than a competition, issued to give industry time to prepare for work that will not go to tender until the middle of next year. Suppliers are told the tender notice itself is expected around 15 June 2027, with the contract running from 1 April 2028 to the end of March 2033 and the possibility of extension to March 2038, which would make it a ten-year commitment.
What is being bought is in-service support for the counter-CBRN capability that provides detection, identification and monitoring of CBRN threats. In practice that means calibration, maintenance and repair across a wide range of equipment, together with the purchase of new capital equipment and the consumables that go with it.
Two capabilities are named in the notice as the things the support is meant to sustain. One is the counter-CBRN Reconnaissance and Exploitation Team, the specialist element that goes forward to survey and sample a contaminated area. The other is the Biological Surveillance and Collector System, which does what its name suggests and watches for biological agents in the air.
Detection equipment of this kind is unusual among military kit in that it is close to useless unless it is calibrated, and a sensor that has drifted out of tolerance is arguably worse than no sensor at all, since it will be trusted. That is why the classifications attached to the notice run to calibration services, the repair and maintenance of gas-detection equipment, military electronic systems and electrical distribution equipment, rather than anything resembling a platform purchase.
