Highways work is delivered out of vehicles, which makes the supplier’s own fleet part of the compliance picture rather than an afterthought. TES has been accredited under the Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme since September 2014, and has held FORS Silver — fleet ID 001657 — since September 2025.
TES supplies hi-vis and weatherwear, PPE, hand and power tools, building materials, welfare and site consumables to highways maintenance contractors and road construction projects across the UK, from a base in West Thurrock, Essex.
Road and highways teams buy across a wider range than most sectors — the same order can carry garments, hand tools, fixings, welfare and vehicle consumables.
Work on high-speed roads is generally specified at EN ISO 20471 Class 3, and a large share of highways work is night work in weather. Hi-vis jackets, trousers, waterproofs and thermal layers, branded to order in our own facility.
Safety helmets, Bollé and Uvex eye protection and hearing protection suited to plant and breaker work. Specified as a combination, because a helmet, visor and defenders that fight each other get taken off.
Grip, impact and cut-resistant gloves to EN 388, and Rockfall and Roots safety footwear to EN ISO 20345 — including options for hot-lay work, where a general construction boot is the wrong specification.
Bahco, Knipex, Facom and Stanley hand tools; DeWalt, Makita, Milwaukee and Bosch power tools, batteries and accessories, held for the replacement rate a maintenance gang actually gets through rather than the theoretical one.
Site consumables, abrasives, tapes, sealants, marking products, welfare and hygiene supplies including SC Johnson professional ranges. The routine half of the order, run on call-off so it is never the reason a gang stands down.
Fuchs lubricants, WD-40, Jubilee hose clips and ABUS site security, plus Bott van racking and workshop storage — specified and fitted through TES workshop design and installation.
On much highways and urban construction work, the fleet delivering to site is in scope of the contract, not outside it. FORS is the scheme that governs it, covering driver standards, vehicle safety equipment, and how a vehicle behaves around vulnerable road users.
TES has been FORS-accredited since September 2014 — eleven years — and has held Silver since September 2025, having previously operated at Gold. The two dates measure different things and are worth stating as a pair: the accreditation is long standing, the current level is recent. Fleet ID 001657 is on the FORS public register.
Alongside it sits the environmental side. TES introduced a fleet of Mercedes eSprinter electric vans for local deliveries in 2020, and holds ISO 14001, certificate 2100, issued by AUVA — the certification that also underpins the workwear and PPE recycling programme, which is increasingly a line item on a highways framework rather than a nice-to-have.
Highways and road contracts are usually let through a pre-qualification route, so the useful thing a supplier can publish is what it is already qualified on:
The road work goes back further than any of the certificates. In 1992, two years after the company was founded, TES supplied fixings, fasteners and tools to the QE2 Bridge construction project — the first major publicly funded infrastructure project the business supplied, and the one that set the pattern for the work that followed. That history is on the about page.
The closest modern equivalent is a few miles downstream. TES has supplied the Silvertown Tunnel — the Riverlinx road tunnel under the Thames, built from 2021 and opened in April 2025, and London’s first new under-river road crossing in more than thirty years. It is a tunnelling job as much as a roads one, and appears on the tunnelling page for that reason. The date is the project’s own construction timeline, not the period TES was supplying it.
Urban highways work rarely arrives on its own. Where it meets the railway or goes underground, the specification changes:
Tell us what you are maintaining or building and where, and we will come back on availability, the standards each item meets, and how deliveries would run — on a FORS Silver accredited fleet.
