Cambridgeshire County Council Direct Payment Support Services

Cambridgeshire County Council is re-tendering its Direct Payment Support Service as the current contract expires on 31st March 2017.

Cambridgeshire has a diverse demography and the Council wishes to work with an organisation who can demonstrate innovative ways to work with both the challenges the demography poses and meeting the needs of service users across our Children, Families and Adults Directorate.

The service will be for people who meet the eligibility criteria for services and only includes social care personal budgets (personal health budgets are out of scope for this contract).

The Council has consulted with people who use or may use this service and a theme that was common is summed up in this quote:

"Work with the service user to help them take on as many tasks as they can - educate them so they are empowered."

To this end we invite applications from suppliers for whom this is the focus of their service and can demonstrate this through their application.

The annual budget for Cambridgeshire County Council is a maximum of £186,000 pa and responses will be evaluated against both this element and the prices charged to service users for the different services available to them as detailed further in the specification. The contract term will be for three years with the potential for an extension of up to two years.

The current provider has approximately 1150 clients on their database. Of those people, 520 are using the payroll service and 339 are utilizing a managed account. We anticipate the number of active cases will be up to 400 at any one time, although there may be seasonal changes to this number. (Active cases are people who have been referred to the service and are currently being supported to put a delivery plan in place).

We welcome bids from partnerships however will be looking for a seamless service for our service users with one point of contact and a clear pathway through the varying services on offer.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Peterborough City Council may use this contract in relation to personal health budgets and social care personal budgets in the future.