Case Study

South Gloucestershire Council — Care and Support in Your Home Pseudo DPS

Tender Overview

South Gloucestershire Council commissions home care through a Pseudo Dynamic Purchasing System, a procurement vehicle that works in a similar way to a standard DPS but gives the council more flexibility in how providers are brought on and how work is allocated. The Care and Support in Your Home Pseudo DPS is structured across three lots: Home, Community, and Partnership. Providers can apply for one, two, or all three, and each lot is assessed separately.

First Practice Healthcare, based in Birmingham, applied for a place across all three lots. AssuredBID prepared the submission. On 24 June 2026, South Gloucestershire Council confirmed the result of the evaluation. First Practice Healthcare secured a place on Lot 1, Home. They were not successful on Lot 2, Community, or Lot 3, Partnership.

It is worth being upfront about that outcome because it shapes everything else in this case study. Winning one lot out of three on a DPS is still a genuine result, and the way the council structures access under this arrangement means the Home lot win gives First Practice Healthcare a real and immediate route to work. But it is not a clean sweep, and we want this case study to reflect exactly what happened rather than present it as something it was not.

The Brief


Client	First Practice Healthcare
Commissioner	South Gloucestershire Council
Tender	Care and Support in Your Home — Pseudo DPS
Lot 1 — Home	Successful
Lot 2 — Community	Not Successful
Lot 3 — Partnership	Not Successful
Cluster Allocation	Primary 4, Secondary 2
Confirmation Date	24 June 2026

Under this Pseudo DPS, providers approved on the Home lot receive work through the council’s Brokerage Referral process, with individual referrals coming through as they arise. Providers successful on the Community and Partnership lots get something additional on top of that: access to mini competitions, including some block contracts. That distinction matters for how First Practice Healthcare’s position should be understood. They have a confirmed route into home care referrals now. The mini competition and block contract route, which sits behind the Community and Partnership lots, is not currently open to them.

Key Challenges

Applying across three lots in one submission is not as simple as writing one response and adapting it twice. Home, Community, and Partnership cover genuinely different service models, and South Gloucestershire’s evaluators were looking for evidence specific to each one. A provider that writes a strong home care response and then lightly edits it for the other two lots tends to get found out, because the detail an evaluator wants for community-based delivery or partnership working is not the same detail that makes a home care response strong.

There was also a clear pass mark built into the process. Every lot required a minimum score of 5 to be considered successful. That is a firm line, not a soft target. A response that was reasonably good but fell just short of that threshold would not pass, regardless of how close it came.

For the Home lot specifically, the evaluators were looking for genuine depth around individual need, not just a general account of how the service works. The feedback we received afterwards bears this out directly. The response scored a 6, comfortably above the pass mark, and was praised for the quality of the examples given and the level of detail tied back to the specification. The one area flagged for improvement was around protected characteristics: more detail on how the service is actually adjusted for an individual’s specific characteristics and needs would have pushed the score even higher. That is a precise, useful piece of feedback, and it tells us something about the standard South Gloucestershire holds providers to even when the answer is already strong.

Our Approach

For the Home lot, we built the response around real examples of how First Practice Healthcare adapts home care delivery to the individual being supported, rather than describing their service in general terms. The evaluators specifically called out the quality of the examples provided and the level of detail that referred back to the specification, which is exactly what we were aiming for. Getting this kind of equality and inclusion evidence right is something we focus on closely across every tender we write, and our equality and inclusion tender writing guidance sets out how we approach it.

The Community and Partnership lots required a different kind of evidence. Community-based delivery and partnership working involve different operational models, different relationships with other organisations, and different ways of demonstrating impact than a home care response does. We wrote distinct submissions for each lot, grounded in First Practice Healthcare’s actual capability in those areas rather than reworking the Home lot content.

Those two lots were not successful. The letter from South Gloucestershire did not include the same level of individual feedback for Community and Partnership that it did for Home, so we cannot point to specific reasons why those submissions fell short in the way we can for the Home lot. What we can say is that the result on Home tells us the approach works when the underlying evidence is strong, and the Q2 feedback on protected characteristics gives a concrete direction for strengthening future submissions across all three lots if South Gloucestershire opens further entry points, which Pseudo DPS arrangements of this kind often do over their lifetime.

We also handled the supporting documentation and the cluster designation process that comes with confirmation on this DPS. First Practice Healthcare’s Home lot approval came with cluster allocations of Primary 4 and Secondary 2, which determine how referrals get routed to them within the council’s geographic structure for home care.

Results

South Gloucestershire Council confirmed the result on 24 June 2026.

Lot	Result	Score	Feedback
Lot 1 — Home	Successful	6 (minimum required: 5)	Strong, specific examples and good level of detail tied to the specification. More detail on protected characteristics and service adjustment would have scored even higher.
Lot 2 — Community	Not Successful	Not provided	Not provided
Lot 3 — Partnership	Not Successful	Not provided	Not provided

The award on Lot 1 remains subject to the council’s standard financial checks and reference verification before it is finalised, which is a normal part of this kind of procurement process.

Conclusion

First Practice Healthcare now has a confirmed place on South Gloucestershire’s Home lot, with referrals coming through the council’s Brokerage Referral process and a defined cluster allocation in place. For a Birmingham-based provider extending into a new local authority area, that is a meaningful and immediate piece of business, not a symbolic win.

The Community and Partnership lots are the honest gap in this result. We are not going to dress that up as something it is not. What we do know is that the Home lot feedback gives a clear and specific signal about what raises a score even further, and that signal is just as relevant to Community and Partnership as it is to Home. If South Gloucestershire opens this Pseudo DPS to further applications, as these arrangements commonly do, that feedback becomes the starting point for a stronger run at all three lots.

If your organisation is applying to a DPS, Pseudo DPS, or any multi-lot framework where different services need genuinely different evidence, talk to us about how we approach it. You can see more of our work on our case studies page, find out more about how we handle dynamic purchasing system applications, or get in touch directly through our contact page to talk through your next submission.

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