The procurement contact named on the official notice.

The submission route named on the official notice.

Essex County Council (the Authority) is seeking to procure a co-production and engagement service to support Adult Social Care (ASC).

The contract will bring together existing co-production services into a single, unified model, providing a coordinated approach to co-production and engagement across Essex.

The service will operate within the context of the Authority’s statutory duties under the Care Act 2014, and its strategic commitment to person-centred, inclusive service design.

Objectives The primary objective of the contract is to deliver an integrated co-production model that: • Maintains and strengthens engagement with adults, carers, and people with lived experience • Provides structured mechanisms, including locality networks, a lived experience forum, and engagement activities • Captures and utilises insight to inform policy, commissioning, and service improvement • Expands participation and improves representation, including seldom-heard groups • Supports the embedding of co-production within ASC governance, assurance, and decision-making processes The overall aim is to ensure a coherent, consistent and impactful approach to co-production, strengthening the influence of lived experience across Adult Social Care.

Essex County Council is using the Open procurement system to manage this procurement process.

Suppliers are strongly encouraged to familiarise themselves with the platform and its functionality before participating in this tender.

Guidance and training materials can be accessed via the following link: Open Training: https://www.open-hub.org/how-to-guides/ Please note that all clarification questions and requests for additional information must be submitted through the formal clarification function within the Open system.

Essex County Council will not accept or respond to clarification requests submitted via email or any other communication channel.

All responses will be issued through the Open system to ensure transparency and equal treatment of all bidders.

For clarification, the published contract notice value includes the anticipated value of the optional extension periods.

For the avoidance of any further doubt, please note that Open procurement system uses ProClass to classify procurement opportunities instead of Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) contrary to the functionality in this notice.

Therefore, the opportunity within the Open procurement system has been prepared using the following ProClass codes which represent the closest matches to the CPV code which this notice is based on: 111230 - Social Care