Few areas of public commissioning are under more strain than temporary and emergency accommodation. Homelessness has risen sharply, local authority budgets are stretched to breaking, and councils are under acute pressure to secure suitable accommodation quickly, at a price they can defend. For providers, that pressure is also an opportunity.…

If you’re bidding to support people with a learning disability or autistic people, and you’re still writing about your “facilities”, your “units”, or your “placements”, you’re speaking a language commissioners have spent a decade trying to move away from. The commissioning of learning disability and autism services has been transformed,…

You’ve found the opportunity. A local authority needs residential provision for children with complex needs, the specification fits your model, and you’re ready to bid. Then comes the question that stops many providers dead: are you Ofsted registered for this provision, at this location, right now? If the answer is…

Most lost bids aren’t lost because the provider wasn’t good enough. They’re lost because of avoidable mistakes, the same handful, again and again. The encouraging news is that once you know what they are, they’re easy to fix. Here are seven of the most common tender mistakes care providers make,…

Ask ten care providers what makes a winning bid and you’ll get ten different answers. Better writing. A lower price. More experience. The right connections. All of these help, but none of them is the real answer. A good bid comes down to a handful of fundamentals that, done consistently,…

There is a legal right that belongs to every unpaid carer in England. It’s free, it applies regardless of income or savings, and it can unlock practical support, respite, and even direct payments. Yet according to Carers UK, only around 23% of carers have had one in the past year.…

When a care provider loses a tender, the post-mortem usually focuses on the bid: the writing, the pricing, the evidence. When a provider loses a contract, mid-delivery, to a poor inspection or a failed mobilisation, the analysis rarely goes back far enough. Both outcomes often trace to the same person,…

You’ve read the tender. The service is squarely within your competence, you’d deliver it well, and the commissioner is one you’d like to work with. Then you reach the selection questionnaire. Minimum annual turnover: £2 million. Yours is £700,000. Three contract examples of comparable scale required. You have one. Geographic…

Ask most care providers what a tender costs them and you’ll get a blank look. Ask what a lost tender costs and you’ll get a shrug. That’s the problem. Bidding is treated as an overhead that happens somewhere between the day job and the evenings, its costs invisible because they…

Behind almost every contract a business wins, there’s a bid manager who made it happen. They rarely take the credit, yet without them, even the most capable organisations would struggle to turn opportunities into wins. In a market where competition is fierce and margins are tight, bid managers are quietly…