Bid writing · Specialism
Extra care and retirement living tenders.
On-site care teams in housing-with-care schemes for older adults. Smaller fields, block-commissioned hours, and consistently overlooked by providers chasing mainstream home care.
Why extra care is worth your time.
Extra care housing puts a care team on site in a scheme of self-contained flats. The council commissions the care, a housing provider owns the building, and the two are usually tendered separately.
Three things make it attractive. The fields are far smaller than mainstream home care, often a dozen bidders rather than a hundred. The hours are block-commissioned rather than call-by-call, so income is predictable and travel time is not eating your margin. And because everyone you support lives in one building, the staffing model is much easier to evidence convincingly.
Providers who already run domiciliary care in the area are usually well placed to bid, and often do not realise the opportunity exists until the framework has closed.
- Extra careOn-site care and support teams in housing-with-care schemes
- RetirementRetirement living with care, and assisted living developments
- ShelteredEnhanced sheltered housing with a visiting or on-site team
- Night coverWaking night and sleep-in provision across a scheme
- WellbeingActivity, wellbeing and community coordinator roles
- Multi-schemeLots covering several schemes across a county
The mistake that costs marks
Extra care is not a care home, and panels check that you know it.
Residents hold their own tenancy. They can decline support, come and go, and have visitors without asking. Submissions written in residential language score badly, and evaluators spot it in the first paragraph.
On-site model
Core hours, how the team is deployed across the building, night cover arrangements, and how staffing flexes as residents' needs change without renegotiating the contract.
Tenancy and choice
How you respect that residents are tenants first. Consent, refusal of support, and the line between a scheme rule and a restriction on someone's home.
Emergency response
Response times to a call within the scheme, falls management, and what happens overnight when the on-site team is one person.
Wellbeing and isolation
Activities, community within the building, and how you measure whether isolation is actually reducing rather than just listing a coffee morning.
Step-up support
Increasing support as needs rise so someone can stay in their flat rather than move into residential care. This is what the commissioner is buying.
Landlord partnership
Working alongside the scheme manager and housing provider without duplication or gaps, and how disputes over responsibility get resolved.
Straight answer
When extra care is the wrong bid.
If you cannot staff a rota inside one building at the hours specified, do not bid. Extra care schemes are unforgiving: there is nowhere to absorb a gap, and a missed night shift is visible to forty residents and a scheme manager the same evening.
We will tell you that at the bid/no-bid stage, before you pay for any writing.
- Can you staff the full rota?Core hours, evenings and the night shift, from week one, without relying on agency.
- Is the scheme reachable?Your team needs to get there reliably at 7am. A scheme forty minutes away will not hold.
- Do you have a night model?Waking night or sleep-in, and what happens when that one person is dealing with a fall.
- Can you show tenancy awareness?Answers written in residential language get spotted immediately.
If any of these is a no, we will say so before you commit.
Got a tender with a deadline on it?
Send the closing date and the portal link. We'll tell you honestly whether it's worth your time, before you pay us anything.