ASC0278 - Leicester and Leicestershire Healthwatch Service

Leicester City Council and Leicestershire County Council (the commissioning partners) will be jointly commissioning the Healthwatch Leicester & Leicestershire (HWL&L) service.

It is anticipated that tenders for the service would be sought in the summer of 2022 to enable a new contract to begin from 1st April 2023. The contract will be for five years and approximately £1.5 million with no inflationary increase. The tender will be subject to Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment (TUPE) considerations.

This Soft Market Testing process gives potential providers (and other stakeholders) the opportunity to express their interest and feed in their views about the potential service model and specification principles. The information gathered will inform the commissioning process.

This process does not constitute a formal tender or other competitive bidding process and will not result in the letting of a Contract. The commissioning partners are using this process solely to test the market to gather information to ascertain the level of interest in this particular service and to appraise options and further develop the specification. Therefore, there are no formal criteria which we will use to judge your responses, and it is not our intention to provide any feedback.

We would encourage you to respond if you feel this is something your organisation may have an interest in.

If you would like to participate in this Soft Market Testing, then please copy and paste the web link to Due North SMT Advert below and download and complete the Soft Market Testing questionnaire located in the attachments section and then email your completed questionnaire to the email address procurement-asc@leicester.gov.uk with the subject heading: 'Completed SMT Q - HW' before or by no later than 14:00 hours 14th April 2022

The Council welcomes the opportunity to engage with and appreciate your assistance in providing us with your views. However, you should note that in any subsequent procurement exercise the Council will have to comply with our legal obligations and that neither the intention nor the purpose of this soft market testing exercise is to confer any advantage upon its participation in any future procurement process.