Support Services Tenders and Contracts

Support services tenders cover respite and community support for adults, home support for people living in their own homes, floating support tied to homelessness and supported housing, domestic abuse refuge and outreach services, direct payment support, mediation panels and in-hospital companion schemes. Councils, NHS bodies and health service executives are the regular buyers. The bare phrase also appears in consultancy and engineering notices as client support or commercial support, which is a different market.

Stotles brings together support services tenders and contracts from 100+ portals into one search, so you do not have to check each portal separately, and you can set alerts for new opportunities across the UK and Ireland.

If you want to search the government portals directly, Find a Tender carries higher-value contracts across the UK and Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland's eTenders covers Irish public bodies, and many councils, NHS bodies and housing associations publish on their own e-tendering portals such as ProContract. Support services are usually let as approved-provider frameworks, light touch frameworks or dynamic purchasing systems, with care and support called off from frameworks such as Scotland Excel's care and support framework.

Regulated care must be registered with the Care Quality Commission or the Care Inspectorate, and staff working with vulnerable adults need enhanced DBS checks. Tenders usually set minimum insurance cover, check financial standing and ask for evidence of similar services at selection stage. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can be excluded for certain criminal convictions, insolvency or failure to pay tax.

Support services contracts are often let as approved-provider frameworks, light-touch frameworks or dynamic purchasing systems rather than a single contract, so the win is joining the list and the work arrives later as call-offs. Individual care and support packages are then awarded by the council or NHS body that holds the list.

Councils and NHS bodies publish support services, usually as an approved-provider framework or dynamic list rather than one contract, with the work arriving later as call-offs.

Read council commissioning strategies, market position statements, housing support and homelessness strategies and cabinet papers on recommissioning. Meet-the-buyer events and prior information notices often come before a framework or dynamic list reopens. On Stotles you can track those signals and the buyers behind them, then follow a notice from pre-tender through to award.

Support services work has no CPV code of its own. Notices lean on 85300000 (Social work and related services), 85000000 (Health and social work services), 85311000 (Social work services with accommodation) and 98000000 (Other community, social and personal services).