Healthwatch Essex Core Service

Essex County Council ("the Council") is undertaking a Soft Market Test (SMT) exercise to inform future commissioning considerations for the Healthwatch Essex Core Service. It may be worth noting that the existing contract for this service is due to end in March 2027.

The Council has a statutory responsibility to commission a local Healthwatch service under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Local Healthwatch acts as the independent champion for people using health and social care services, ensuring that residents' voices are heard and used to inform service improvement across the health and care system.

Please note that pending governance approval, any newly commissioned service is expected to commence from April 2027 and is due to be fully funded via an external grant funding arrangement.

At this stage, no decision has been made regarding future commissioning arrangements. The purpose of this exercise is to engage with the market and gain insight into prospective providers' capability, capacity to deliver the proposed service alongside seeking their views on the potential delivery models including any innovative approaches or alternative options based on their experience of delivering similar services.

The Council's ambition is for the Essex Healthwatch service to be an independent, influential and impactful voice for Essex residents, ensuring that feedback from local people leads to meaningful change across health and social care services. The Council wishes to maintain a service that is demonstrably independent whilst working collaboratively with partners across the health and care system.

The council is particularly interested in models that:

• Deliver statutory responsibilities effectively and independently.
• Increase engagement with diverse and under-represented communities
• Ensure insight and feedback are representative of Essex residents.
• Demonstrate clear impact and outcomes from engagement activity.
• Strengthen the link between resident experience, service improvement and Adult Social Care priorities.

All statutory responsibilities must be delivered by providers, ensuring public involvement, community feedback collection, and service improvement advocacy under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. These statutory responsibilities are:

1. Promoting and supporting the involvement of local people in the commissioning, provision and scrutiny of local care services.
2. Enabling local people to monitor the standard of provision of local care services and whether and how local care services could and ought to be improved.
3. Obtaining the views of local people regarding their needs for, and experiences of, local care services and importantly to make these views known.
4. Making reports and recommendations about how local care services could or ought to be improved. These should be directed to commissioners and providers of care services, and people responsible for managing or scrutinising local care services, and shared with Healthwatch England.
5. Providing advice and information about access to local care services so choices can be made about local care services.
6. Formulating views on the standard of provision and whether and how the local care services could and ought to be improved, and to share these views with Healthwatch England.
7. Making recommendations to Healthwatch England to advise the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to conduct special reviews or investigations (or, where the circumstances justify doing so, making such recommendations direct to the CQC); and to make recommendations to Healthwatch England to publish reports about particular issues.
8. Providing Healthwatch England with intelligence and insight to enable it to perform effectively.

Please note that the Council reserves the right to refine the scope of this proposed procurement following the market engagement process. In addition, please note that this procurement remains subject to governance approval. Therefore, the Council will confirm the final scope of the procurement, including but not limited to, the contract duration and value alongside the confirmed procurement timetable in the corresponding Tender Notice following the conclusion of the requisite governance process.

In addition, please note that the contracting authority for this service is Essex County Council and any Successor Body meaning one or more entities which assumes any of the Council's functions (as applicable) as a result of Local Government Reform (LGR). Such successor body or bodies may be, without limitation, a local authority, a combined authority, a combined county authority, a strategic authority or any other status determined pursuant to the Devolution and LGR Legislation.

In addition, please note that further details of the Council's commissioning intentions for this service and a suite of soft market test questions can be located via the Council's e-sourcing platform, NEPO:OPEN:

www.open-uk.org/opportunities ↗

Please note that you will need to undertake a registration process to secure a user account to access the aforementioned briefing document via OPEN. However, please be advised that the registration process is free of charge and will also provide access to any forthcoming procurement opportunities which Essex County Council issues in due course. In addition, please be advised that this deadline for responding to this soft market test will be 17:00 on Friday 4th September 2026 and all responses must be submitted via the online questionnaire functionality within OPEN. Likewise, if you require any clarification regarding the briefing document, please use the messaging functionality within OPEN.