A COMPANY which provides speech and language therapy services has lost its High Court challenge to the HSE’s refusal to give it a contract to provide such services to 100 young children in Co Louth on a pilot basis.
Release Speech Therapy Ltd was the only entity which tendered for the contract advertised in August 2007 but was informed by the HSE in March 2008 that its tender was unsuccessful. No contract has been awarded since.
In advertising the tender, the HSE said its hope was several tenderers would be successful and these would then be included in a panel from which they would be selected to provide services as the need arose.
However, the model of group tuition proposed by the RST did not meet the service requirements, the HSE said.
The age profile of the children involved, from babies to age five, demonstrated a range of services would be required to provide the programme to a full cohort of children in the group, it said. Its concern was that the RST tender focused only on group therapy and appeared to limit its therapy to children assessed as suitable for the group therapy model.
In a reserved judgment yesterday, Mr Justice Bryan McMahon dismissed RST’s complaints about the conduct of the tender process and refused its application for an order quashing the refusal of the contract.
Rejecting claims that the invitation to tender was misleading, he ruled a “reasonably well-informed and diligent” tenderer would have understood they were required to provide both individual and group therapy to qualify for the contract.
At a tender evaluation meeting, RST had been given the opportunity to expand the services it was willing to provide but had stated its refusal to provide individual therapy was “non-negotiable”, he said.
In the circumstances, the HSE was entitled to conclude the company was not qualified for the contract. Given those conclusions, the judge said the company’s other complaints about the tender document “fall away to nothing”.
