Care & Support Services in Extra Care Housing settings

This VEAT notice is to provide notice of the Contracting Authority's intention to award short-term contracts to its incumbent providers to deliver care and support services in its Extra Care Housing settings. This notice covers three contracts; each contract will have a term of 15 months.

The details of these contracts are:

1 Provision of Care & Support Services at Cranbrook & Bentley Grange Extra Care schemes. Value £1,069,470 to CSN Care Group Ltd.

2 Provision of Care and Support Services at Downlands Court and Margaret House Extra Care schemes. Value £1,182,781 to Care At Home Services Ltd.

3 Provision of Care and Support Services at The Orangery and Marlborough House Extra Care schemes. Value £940,704 to Care At Home Services Ltd.

The current contracts have been awarded following competitive tendering processes carried out during 2017 and 2018 under the Light Touch Regime Reg 74, compliant with PCR 2015.

The current Covid 19 pandemic situation has resulted in a critical situation across many areas of social care. The outbreak, along with the staff shortages and the additional pressure created by new Covid variant strains, have impacted significantly on provision of these services and on providers' capacity to engage in tender activity, thereby undermining competition at this time for these services.

The Contracting Authority is currently undertaking a recommissioning process, which has been in progress since 2019, but which itself has been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Contracting Authority plans to procure a provider list for delivery of home care and extra care in one tender, because service provision across both care-delivery settings has the same core requirements.

This approach is expected to improve competition for both extra care and home care. In so doing, the Contracting Authority will mitigate risks to service provision, including failure linked to Covid19 impacts through putting in place arrangements with alternative qualified providers available, should they be needed.

The pressured provider market makes it clear that no current alternatives or substitutes exist. The Contracting Authority's commissioning strategy is to extend the scope of the procurement in order to encourage a stronger market response when the re-procurement process is commenced.

The Contracting Authority conducted consultations with providers. The conclusion is that a procurement exercise launched now would fail, because providers would be unable to respond. If a process were to be attempted on shorter timescales than those outlined above, the recommissioning process would not deliver the most cost effective model for delivery and the Contracting Authority would severely limit the number and quality of responses it would receive -whether it would receive any at all is open to doubt.

Since market feedback indicates that it is likely that there will be few or no bids submitted in response to a tender in current circumstances, then from a technical or economic analysis of the theory of competition, competition is absent. Delaying the tender for a period will allow the market to recover and will enable the Contracting Authority to issue a new, combined tender issued covering both Home Care and Extra Care with the intent of establishing a larger market opportunity for potential bidders. It is clear that this course of action meets the purpose of the Regulations - namely, to provide an open and transparent system for the competition for public contracts in the interests of securing a fair and efficient market for those contracts and that no reasonable substitute or alternative exists.