Transferring Care for 3 individuals with a Learning Disability and/or are autistic who display behaviours that challenge, including those with a mental health condition into Nixon Street-NHS Cheshire & Merseyside ICB

This notice is an intention to award a contract notice, for a competitive process, in line with the requirements for Health Services and mixed procurements which fall under Regulation 3 and 11 for the award of a contract with a competition, and Schedule 1 of the Health Care Services (Provider Selection Regime) Regulations 2023.

This is a new service and the contract will be awarded to a new provider.

The contract was planned to start 27th April 2026, however, due to unforeseen delays in the procurement process, the contract start date will now be 1st June 2026.

The contract will be for 3 years with an option to extend for a further 2 years, until 31st May 2031.

The Invitation to Tender was live on Monday 15th December 2025 on the Atamis Portal.

The deadline for submissions was Tuesday 20th January 2026 12:00pm.

To express interest and participate in the Competitive Process, providers were instructed to register and apply via Atamis e-sourcing portal atamis-1928.my.site.com/s/Welcome ↗

The Atamis contract reference was C405584 'Dec 25 - C&M Transferring Care for 3 individuals into Nixon Street'.

The overall maximum financial envelope for this tender was £6,119,704.00 (for 3 years with an option to extend for a further 2 years), based on 2:1 support for each individual in the first year.

This was the figure used to assess the bids financially.

There may be some fluctuations in the package requirements stepping down for one individual, as it's expected the support needed will reduce during the contract period.

Any bid whose overall cost was higher than the overall maximum financial envelope of £6,119,704.00 for the total 5-year contract (3 years with an option to extend for a further 2 years), was to be viewed as non-compliant and would take no further part in the procurement exercise.

In addition, any bid whose annual maximum financial values were higher than the maximum financial values for each year shown below, was also viewed as non-compliant and would take no further part in the procurement exercise.

This was done during the evaluation of the Pass / Fail criteria stage (please see procurement document Annex 7 Evaluation Model, section 3.10(b) for details).

The maximum annual financial values were as below:

Year 1 - £1,653,524.00

Year 2 - £1,116,545.00

Year 3 - £1,116,545.00

Year 4 - £1,116,545.00

Year 5 - £1,116,545.00.

There will need to be flexibility regarding the packages should there be a change in the clinical need for one or more of the package, these changes will be based on the individual's needs and matched to the level of staffing required to support these needs as contained in the Annex 13 Tiered Rates document provided with the tender documents.

The cost analysis was based on the lowest overall price submitted for the maximum financial value (under £6,119,704.00 for the total 5-year contract (3 years with an option to extend for a further 2 years). The 5 year total was to be evaluated.

If additional care is required, then this will be paid at the additional rates identified in Annex 13 Tiered Rates.

The approximate lifetime value of the contract that has been awarded is £5,859,703 for 5 years (3 years, with an option to extend for a further 2 years). This was below the maximum financial envelope of £6,119,704.

The questionnaires were located within the requirements.

Further details were made available via documentation and information released during the tender process.

The contract award criteria was specified in the procurement documents, including the agreed relative importance of key criteria (e.g., weighting, prioritisation) against which the bids were evaluated.

The ICB considers this service to be a mixed procurement, in line with Provider Selection Regime (PSR) Regulation 3, with the main benefits of the overall health service placing this key service under Provider Selection Regime for the arrangement of Healthcare services where:

the main subject matter of the contract is in-scope healthcare services;

and the relevant authority is of the view that the out of scope goods or services could not reasonably be supplied under a separate contract (that is, where procuring goods or services separately would likely prevent the relevant authority from meeting its duty to act in accordance with the procurement principles).