5 Things Commissioners Wish Providers Understood About Social Care Tenders
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Commissioners and procurement teams read a lot of tenders. For every contract awarded, they may have sifted through dozens of submissions – many of them long, repetitive and saying broadly the same things.
Over the years, through debriefs, market engagement events and evaluation feedback, a few consistent themes keep coming up. Commissioners often wish providers understood certain things about how they read, score and experience tenders.
This article explores five of those recurring themes – to help you write bids that are clearer, more grounded and easier to score fairly.
1. “Show us outcomes – not just warm words.”
Commissioners are usually under pressure to demonstrate that commissioned services are delivering outcomes, not just hours of support. They often see bids full of kind, values-based language – but light on evidence.
What they really want to see is:
- Clear, concrete outcomes linked to people’s independence, wellbeing, safety and quality of life
- Examples and mini case studies that show how your approach makes a difference day to day
- Simple outcome data or KPIs – even if small-scale – showing impact over time
- How you track and learn from outcomes as part of your quality and review cycle
A useful rule of thumb: for every paragraph of “what we believe”, try to include at least one paragraph of “what this looks like in practice, and what changed as a result”.
2. “We need to picture your delivery model clearly.”
Many bids describe care and support in very general terms – “person-centred”, “flexible”, “strengths-based”. Commissioners agree with those principles, but during evaluation they are asking:
- What does your actual delivery model look like for this contract?
- How will staffing, skill mix and rotas work in practice?
- Who is accountable for what – locally, regionally and organisationally?
- How will you mobilise safely and realistically in the timescales?
Strong answers often include a short, plain-English description of the model – sometimes structured as “Input → Activities → Outcomes”. Diagrams aren’t always possible in portals, but you can still walk the evaluator through:
- How referrals come in and are triaged
- How assessments, planning and reviews are carried out
- How staff are deployed and supervised
- How issues are escalated and resolved
The more commissioners can picture your service running on Monday morning, the more confident they feel in scoring you highly.
3. “Policies alone don’t prove quality.”
Tender responses often list a long suite of policies – safeguarding, MCA, complaints, medicines, incident management, business continuity, and so on. Commissioners expect those to exist, but:
Policies are the starting point, not the evidence.
What differentiates stronger bids is how you show that policies are:
- Understood by staff – through training, supervision and spot checks
- Used in practice – with examples of decisions, escalations or changes driven by them
- Reviewed and improved – with learning from audits, incidents or feedback
Commissioners frequently say they look for “the golden thread”: policy → practice → evidence → learning. Even one or two well-chosen examples (e.g. how a safeguarding learning review changed your induction or supervision) can make a big difference to how credible you feel.
4. “Be honest about risk, mobilisation and capacity.”
It can be tempting to promise rapid mobilisation, seamless TUPE transfers and instant recruitment. Commissioners understand why providers want to sound confident – but they are also wary of over-promising.
They usually prefer a bid that is:
- Realistic on timelines – with clear milestones and dependencies
- Open about risks – recruitment, property, transition, IT, local workforce market
- Specific about mitigations – how you have managed similar challenges elsewhere
- Clear on what you need from them – e.g. data, introductions, property or IT access
The same applies to social value. Commissioners increasingly want tangible, measurable commitments – not generic promises. It’s far better to offer:
- Fewer, realistic social value actions that you can track and deliver
- With specific metrics (e.g. number of apprenticeships, volunteer hours, local suppliers)
than to list a dozen headline pledges that don’t clearly connect to your service or capacity.
5. “Readable, structured answers help us score you fairly.”
Evaluation panels are often working to tight timescales and detailed scoring frameworks. They may not be subject experts – or they may be reading your answer after reviewing multiple other bids.
The more you help them navigate your answer, the easier it is for them to find the evidence against each scoring criterion. Commissioners often appreciate bids that use:
- Sub-headings that mirror the question (e.g. “Assessment”, “Safeguarding”, “Co-production”, “Workforce”)
- Concise paragraphs and bullet points rather than long, dense blocks of text
- Signposting to evidence – “For example…”, “In practice this means…”, “We measure this by…”
- Plain English – avoiding excessive jargon, unexplained acronyms or internal language
A good test is to imagine someone new to the service reading your answer. Can they quickly see:
- What you are proposing to do
- How it will work day to day
- Why it is safe, compliant and person-centred
- How you will know it is working – and what happens if it isn’t
If the answer is yes, you are making it much easier for commissioners to award you high marks against the scoring grid.
Bringing it together
Ultimately, commissioners want providers who will deliver safe, high-quality, outcomes-focused support and work as constructive partners over the life of the contract. Tenders are simply the way they have to evidence those decisions.
By focusing on outcomes, clearly describing your delivery model, moving beyond policies to real practice, being honest about risk and capacity, and making answers easy to read and score, you greatly increase your chances of standing out – even in competitive processes.
If you’d find it useful, you can explore more plain-English articles on tendering, commissioning and quality in the: 🧠 Impact Guru Social Care Knowledge Hub.
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