Children in Care & Care Leavers Flexible DPS

The London Borough of Sutton have developed a commissioning strategy to build and strengthen the Authority's successful accommodation and support offer for children and young people in our care and care-experienced young people.

A priority is to ensure good quality, local provision of placements, accommodation and support, informed by our children and young people, which offers choice and makes best use of available resources.

The Authority is seeking to develop key trusted partner relationships to address market challenges. We will introduce a differentiated provider relationship model to enable and incentivise targeted investment of resources and partnership working with key trusted providers to support continued improvement of placement quality and sufficiency.

The Authority is setting up a Flexible DPS for the delivery of Children in Care and Care Leavers services which will be commissioned in accordance with Regulation 74 of the Public Contract Regulations 2015 (Light Touch Regime for Health and Social Care) which provide that Contracting Authorities can deviate from the standard procurement procedures and design their own procedures (according to their own needs).

The DPS is Lot based and will provide successful suppliers with opportunities for individual placement referrals throughout the term of the DPS. There will also be opportunities to tender for contracts for Directly Commissioned Services by way of mini competitions inviting successful Suppliers within the Lots to which the opportunity applies.

Calling off Services from the Flexible DPS During the Term:

Services will be called off from the DPS by issuing Independent Placement Referrals to DPS Suppliers via email where they will be invited to respond with placement offers which will be selected via a matching process. The Authority provides no guarantee of any work to any successful Tenderer appointed to the flexible framework agreement.

The Authority anticipates that during the term of the DPS agreement Directly Commissioned Contracts may also be called off subject to a mini-competition process the details of which, including a detailed mini-specification will be published at the point of mini-competition via the E-Tendering System.

These mini competitions for targeted service offers for groups of children and young people with a shared placement need will be run using the list of providers established on each lot of the DPS. This is different to the individual placements that will be made from the DPS.