Domiciliary care and supported living tenders.

Why these are hard to win.

Home care frameworks routinely attract triple-figure submissions. One Bedfordshire framework we hold the letter for received 154 tenders and admitted 44.

At that ratio, a fluent, sincere, unevidenced answer is not a near miss, it is nowhere. Every provider claims person-centred care and robust safeguarding. The scoring gap opens on who can attach numbers, named roles and timescales to those claims.

Ranking matters as much as admission. On zonal and lot-based frameworks, referrals flow down the list in order. Scraping onto a framework in position 38 of 44 can mean a place on paper and almost no call-offs in practice.

Worth a look

Extra care is the one most providers overlook.

Extra care housing puts an on-site care team into a scheme of self-contained flats for older adults. The local authority commissions the care, the housing provider owns the building, and the two are usually tendered separately.

It is worth bidding for three reasons. The fields are smaller than mainstream home care, often a dozen bidders rather than a hundred. The hours are block-commissioned rather than call-by-call, so the income is predictable and there is no travel time eating your margin. And because the residents are in one building, the staffing model is far easier to evidence convincingly.

The catch is that panels want to see you understand the difference between extra care and a care home. Residents hold their own tenancy, they can refuse support, and the answers have to reflect that. Providers who submit residential-style answers here score badly.