Day services don’t get much attention. When your local council talks about social care, they’re usually discussing care homes, home care, or supported living. When there’s another article about the sector being in crisis, it’s about care workers and nurses. Day services just keep running quietly in the background, supporting thousands of people who’d otherwise be stuck at home with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Then the council decides it needs to save money and suddenly everyone realises what day services were actually doing all along.

Here’s what day services provide for people with learning disabilities, mental health needs, dementia, or physical disabilities. Structured activities that give life some shape. Social contact that stops people becoming isolated. Therapeutic support that maintains skills and independence. Community connections that make people feel like they’re part of something. And critically, respite for family carers who’d burn out without those few hours when someone else takes responsibility.

Yet day services get consistently undervalued when commissioning decisions are made. They’re underfunded compared to every other type of care service. And when councils need to find savings, day services are usually first on the list. The whole sector operates on margins that would make residential care providers laugh whilst delivering support for people with genuinely complex needs.

Why Nobody Seems to Value Day Services

Part of the problem is that day services don’t look urgent. Care homes are obviously essential. People need somewhere to live. Home care is equally straightforward. People need help getting up, washed, fed. Without these services, bad things happen quickly.

Day services look different. People aren’t living there. They’re not getting personal care. They’re doing activities, chatting with each other, and going on trips. To a commissioner looking at a budget that doesn’t add up, that can seem like something nice rather than something necessary.

This completely misses what’s actually happening. For loads of people with learning disabilities, day services are their main social life. It’s where they see their friends, learn new skills, and feel part of their community. Without day services, they’re at home all day with nothing to do except watch telly and wait for family to finish work. That’s not a life.

For people with dementia, day services keep their minds active and give their families the break they desperately need to keep caring. Cut that respite and family arrangements collapse. People end up in care homes years before they actually needed to, costing far more than the day service ever did.

For people with mental health conditions, day services provide routine, purpose, and connection that stops things spiralling. Get rid of the day service and watch crisis admissions increase. The prevention value is massive, but it’s invisible when you’re just looking at this year’s budget.

The money saved by cutting day services shows up nicely in the current budget. The increased costs that follow appear in NHS budgets or next year’s residential care spending. The commissioner making the cut doesn’t see the connection, or chooses not to.

What Makes Day Services Tenders So Difficult

When day services do come up for tender, providers face challenges that other care sectors don’t deal with as badly.

Commissioners often don’t really understand what they’re commissioning. They write specifications asking for qualified staff delivering therapeutic activities but price it like you’re running a youth club. The gap between what they want and what they’ll pay makes sustainable delivery basically impossible.

Measuring outcomes for day services is genuinely hard. How do you prove you prevented someone becoming isolated? How do you evidence maintaining skills that would otherwise decline? These are real, valuable outcomes, but they don’t fit neatly into the boxes commissioners want to tick. Tenders end up focusing on attendance numbers and activities delivered rather than whether anyone’s life actually improved.

Transport is a huge cost that gets mentioned in specifications and then not properly funded. Many service users can’t get to day services independently. You’re collecting people from all over the borough, dealing with wheelchairs and walking frames, making sure there’s appropriate staff support during journeys. That’s expensive. Yet commissioners seem to expect you to just sort transport out somehow within a budget that barely covers the activities.

Then there’s facilities and equipment. You need accessible buildings, specialist equipment for different activities, enough space for people with mobility aids, appropriate facilities for personal care needs. Running five or six sessions a week in premises that meet all the regulations costs serious money. But some commissioners seem to think you should be using donated space with equipment you’ve scrounged.

The result is tender prices that specify high quality therapeutic support whilst funding basic activity provision. Providers either don’t bid, bid unrealistically low and then struggle throughout the contract, or subsidise day services from their more profitable home care contracts.

What It Actually Costs to Run Day Services Properly

You need qualified staff. Supporting people with learning disabilities requires training in positive behaviour support, Makaton or other communication methods, and person-centred approaches. Supporting people with dementia needs understanding of how dementia affects people and how to make activities meaningful. This isn’t something you can pay minimum wage for and expect quality.

The ratios need to reflect actual needs. A day service for people with complex learning disabilities might need one staff member for every two or three service users. That’s completely different from the one to six or one to eight ratios some commissioners seem to assume are adequate.

Buildings cost money. Accessible premises with proper facilities, equipment that meets needs, materials for activities, and transport all require investment. You can’t wish suitable environments into existence through positive thinking.

Insurance, CQC registration fees, quality assurance systems all cost the same whether you’re supporting three people or thirty. Small day services particularly struggle to spread these fixed costs.

Add all this together and sustainable day service delivery costs significantly more than many commissioners seem willing to pay. The sector operates on margins that other care services would consider financial suicide whilst supporting people with equally complex needs.

Why This Kills Competition

Inadequate pricing has pushed loads of experienced providers out of day services completely. They’ve decided that contracts guaranteeing financial losses aren’t worth pursuing regardless of how committed they are to the people they support.

This leaves commissioners with limited interest, often from providers who don’t specialise in day services and haven’t quite understood the economics yet. These providers win contracts, discover the reality during delivery, quality suffers, and the cycle continues. Commissioners wonder why they can’t find good day service providers whilst pricing contracts at levels that make loss inevitable.

The providers still doing day services are often doing it from commitment rather than business logic. They’re subsidising day services from other contracts, operating on unsustainable margins, or relying on charity funding to make up the difference between contract income and actual costs.

This isn’t sustainable. Good providers burning out or walking away from day services means fewer decent options for commissioners and worse services for the people who depend on them.

What Actually Needs to Change

Commissioners need to recognise that day services prevent expensive interventions. The family carer getting regular respite keeps caring longer. The person with learning disabilities staying engaged doesn’t need residential placement. The person with dementia maintaining connection stays home for years longer. The person with mental health needs accessing structured support doesn’t end up in crisis.

These benefits don’t appear in day services budgets, but they’re real financial impacts across the wider system. Cutting day services to save money now almost always costs more later. Everyone knows this, but the budget pressures are immediate whilst the consequences are someone else’s problem.

Quality day services need proper investment in specialist staff, suitable facilities, and realistic delivery models. Tender prices that ignore these costs either fail to attract capable providers or set services up for failure.

Day services should be valued as specialist provision requiring qualified staff and appropriate resources, not cheap activity centres. They should be priced to reflect genuine delivery costs including transport, facilities, and adequate staffing. They should be measured on outcomes that matter rather than what’s easy to count.

Most importantly, day services should be recognised as essential community infrastructure rather than optional extras that can be cut when money gets tight.

Where We Go From Here

Day services need to be seen as core social care alongside residential, home care, and supported living. They need sustainable funding that reflects real costs. They need outcome frameworks that capture their prevention value.

Providers need to get better at explaining the actual value they deliver and what it genuinely costs. Accepting rubbish contracts just to keep services running ultimately damages the sector by confirming commissioner assumptions about what day services should cost.

The sector needs a stronger collective voice to challenge the systematic undervaluation that’s slowly killing these services. Individual providers competing for inadequate contracts can’t change commissioner understanding on their own.

Day services keep vulnerable people connected, engaged, and supported in their communities whilst preventing far more expensive interventions later. They deserve recognition and funding that reflects that reality instead of being treated as the bit of social care you can safely cut.

Finding day services tenders impossible to win at sustainable prices? Our team helps day service providers evidence their real value and challenge unrealistic assumptions through properly cost tender responses.