PUBLIC SECTOR

Replacement deal now expected in mid-2029 as body says safe transition will take at least five years

Transport for London (TfL) has extended supplier Capita's two road user charging contracts at a potential cost of £912 million including VAT after delaying the start of a combined replacement by two years.

TfL announced it was directly awarding the contract extensions to Capita on June 11, saying this was required given the time it will take to buy and implement a replacement support service for its road user charging schemes. These comprise the congestion charge, Low and Ultra Low Emission Zones (LEZ/ULEZ), tolls for the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels, HGV safety permits, and traffic fines, with the work including processing data from thousands of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras along with customer account management, payment, and billing.

In May 2025, TfL said that it wanted to replace Capita's current contracts for Business Operations (BOps) and Enforcement Operations (EOps) for Road User Charging with a single deal. It planned to publish a full tender notice for this around March 31, 2026, and start the new contract on September 30, 2027. In a revision of this notice in February this year, it pushed back the tender notice to April 15, 2027, and the contract start to October 2, 2028.

Last week, TfL said it plans to award the new combined contract in mid-2029, in procurement notices extending the BOps contract at a cost of up to £510 million and the EOps one by up to £402 million. Both extensions are for five years with the option to extend them to a total of seven.

"Due to the scale and complexity of the existing services and the need to design, build, integrate and safely deploy a replacement solution, the full procurement, mobilisation and transition is expected to require a minimum of five years based on current programme assumptions," TfL said in the notices. It added that it will have rights to end the extended contracts early, "enabling TfL to transition to a replacement supplier at the earliest point at which it is technically feasible and operationally safe to do so." TfL expects the new combined contract to be worth more than £2 billion over 20 years.

Last month, TfL disclosed that its Revenue Collection Services contract, which it awarded to Spanish defense and tech group Indra Sistemas in January covering almost all public transport ticketing in London, could be worth up to £1.964 billion if all extensions and variations are exercised. ®