VIVO Defence starts maintenance, project work and grounds maintenance for Dstl

Land December 6, 2023

VIVO Defence Services has started providing hard facilities management services for the Government’s Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).

All reactive and planned maintenance, as well as grounds’ maintenance and billable works, will be provided by VIVO for the government agency at its sites in the southwest on behalf of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO), which is part of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Dstl provides the science inside UK defence and security and has its headquarters, near Salisbury, Wiltshire.

VIVO will provide hard facilities management (FM) and grounds’ maintenance services at the site, as well as at Portsdown West, in Fareham, Hampshire.

The work was awarded to VIVO in June 2021 as part of the Future Defence Infrastructure Services (FDIS) contract for hard FM services for all UK defence sites on the Built Estate across the southwest region.

Following that award, the launch of hard FM and soft FM services were staggered so the soft provider could successfully mobilise their services – such as cleaning and catering.

VIVO’s hard FM services were planned to follow a year later to accommodate this and will go live providing services across more than 400 buildings and around 7,500 acres of land across the two sites at the start of December.

Jerry Moloney, Managing Director of VIVO Defence Services, said: “Our teams have been working closely with Dstl and DIO over the past few months mobilising our services and I would like to thank them and our partners for all their hard work.

“Looking after the facilities at Dstl is an important task and fully compliments our portfolio of work as an organisation that provides facilities management services solely for the UK military and its partners. We are proud to support this critical UK military facility.”

VIVO Defence Services – a 50/50 joint venture between Equans and Serco – already provides maintenance, grounds maintenance and billable works for Service Family Accommodation across the southwest and southeast regions as well as the Built Estate in the southwest and central areas.

Those contracts were awarded to VIVO for seven years with an option to extend for a further three years and the Dstl contract will run along the same timelines.

VIVO was also awarded the contract to run maintenance and housing services for the US airforce across eight main United States Visiting Forces (USVF) sites and three associated ones in England.

All this work, which is carried out on behalf of DIO, makes VIVO – which started operations in 2022 – the largest provider of estate services to the MoD in the United Kingdom.