Losing bidder’s offer on legal action over Christmas events
An events company threatening legal action against Edinburgh City Council over its handling of the contract for the Christmas festival says it will drop its court challenge if the process is re-run “properly” next year.
GC Live accused the council of showing “bias” toward Unique Assembly – the consortium which councillors have agreed to award the contract to – but said it did not wish to “damage the prospect of Christmas being delivered in Edinburgh this year”.
The Bathgate-based firm’s boss, Geoff Crow, told members of the council’s scrutiny committee on Tuesday he had concerns about “irregularities, the probity, transparency and fairness of the process leading to the appointment of the preferred bidder”.
After it emerged Unique Assembly were being backed to deliver the festive events for up to five more years – having been in charge since stepping in as emergency contractors in 2022 – rival bidder GC Live wrote to councillors last month claiming officials did not follow their own procurement rules, and said it was preparing to launch legal action in the Court of Session.
Addressing councillors, Mr Crow proposed GC Live would “drop the current legal challenge” on the basis the new contract length was reduced from a minimum of three years to one “and the process is re-run properly” for 2025. He said: “What we do not want to do is damage the prospect of Christmas being delivered in Edinburgh this year.”
GC Live alleges the council “have a bias” towards Unique Assembly.
Mr Crow said: “Stage one assessments are designed within tender processes to prevent a bidder who would not pass the basic financial criteria to progress to later stages of the process to save them wasting considerable time and money in creating a detailed submission.
He claimed that while his company’s credit rating at the time of the stage one assessment was in the category of “low risk”, the rating of the preferred bidder would have been “maximum risk”.
He added: “I believe one bidder was excluded from the process at that stage for not meeting set criteria. However, we believe the preferred bidder also did not pass criteria but seemingly was allowed to continue.”