Hertfordshire Reablement Services Tender 2026 (HCC 09/26)

Hertfordshire County Council has published HCC 09/26, the Provision of Reablement Services, a standalone reablement services contract worth £52.9m including VAT across 11 lots and starting in 2027. If you are weighing up the Hertfordshire reablement tender, one fact should shape every decision: quality carries 80% of the score and price only 20%, and price is scored on how far you sit below a fixed ceiling, not on being the cheapest. This is a quality contract with a price gate, and reading the Hertfordshire County Council reablement competition as a lowest-price fight is the fastest way to lose it.

At a glance

• Buyer: Hertfordshire County Council (Robertson House, Stevenage). Reference HCC2618115-125, FTS notice 085793-2026.
• Value: £52.9m including VAT across all 11 lots. An indicative delivery envelope, from indicative block hours at the ceiling, is roughly £8.3m per year.
• Term and start: Initial 3 years from 1 April 2027 (mobilisation from 15 January 2027) to 31 March 2030, extendable by up to a further 2 years, a maximum of 5 years to 31 March 2032.
• Deadline: 12:00 noon on 8 October 2026. Clarifications close 12:00 noon on 25 September 2026, with the Council responding by 2 October 2026.
• Scoring: Quality 80%, price 20%.
• Lots: 11 lots aligned to future unitary boundaries, a maximum of 4 lots awarded to any single provider, one provider per lot.
• Regime: Procurement Act 2023 with the Procurement Regulations 2024, open procedure, light-touch, e-tendering via Supply Hertfordshire (In-Tend).

The contract and the 11 lots: the new Hertfordshire reablement geography

The current combined reablement and Support at Home lead-provider contracts expire on 31 March 2027, and rather than renew, the Council is carving reablement out as a standalone reablement services contract, redrawing the county into 11 lots aligned to future unitary boundaries and moving to outcome-based commissioning.

The 11 lots are Welwyn Hatfield, Stevenage, Broxbourne, East Herts, Three Rivers, Watford, Hertsmere, Dacorum West, Dacorum East, St Albans South and St Albans North. Two areas, North Herts and Royston, sit outside this competition and are retained by the Council's own local authority trading company, so do not plan coverage there.

A single provider can be awarded a maximum of 4 lots, each to one provider only. You cannot pick which of your bid lots you are awarded, and where bids tie the higher quality score wins, so quality is both the bulk of the score and the tie-breaker.

Price one further risk in now. Local Government Reorganisation is expected to create new unitary councils around April 2028, and the Council has signalled the contract may be modified or novated to a successor authority mid-term. The counterparty you sign with in 2027 may not be the one you invoice in 2029.

How the HCC 09/26 reablement bid is scored

The headline split is quality 80%, price 20%. Each quality question is marked 0 to 4: 0 Unacceptable, 1 Weak, 2 Poor, 3 Satisfactory, 4 Good. A 4 requires added value, not compliance alone.

The 80% quality pool splits across five questions: Service Delivery 30%, Mobilisation 20%, Outcomes and KPIs 20%, Workforce 20%, Partnership Working 10%. In overall contract weight, that is roughly Service Delivery 24%, Mobilisation 16%, Outcomes 16%, Workforce 16%, Partnership 8%, Price 20%. Service Delivery alone outweighs your entire price, and we would put your most senior writing effort there.

There is a hard gate: scoring 2 or below on 3 of the 5 quality questions makes the whole bid non-compliant, regardless of price, so a cheap submission with weak narrative fails outright.

Price is scored on deviation from the ceiling, not against the lowest bidder. The £35.00 ceiling scores only 5 out of 10; a bid 5% or more below scores the full 10; anything above scores 0 and fails.

You must also pass the selection gates. Economic and financial standing is tested on a Dun and Bradstreet failure score of 60 or higher, a current ratio of at least 0.80, a positive operating surplus, and an unqualified audit opinion. Insurance minimums are Employer's Liability £10m, Public Liability £5m, Professional Indemnity £5m, Medical Malpractice £10m, and Abuse £2m. On experience, you need at least 2 years delivering reablement or enablement-focused support to adults 18 and over, and a CQC-registered branch in Hertfordshire, or a commitment to establish one on award, rated Good or above by CQC and/or PAMMS. A modern slavery statement is required if turnover is £36m or more, and if you are caught by IR35, 15.5% is added to your price for evaluation only. Fail a gate and the quality writing is never read.

The reablement service model evaluators expect

Reablement here is intermediate care: a person-centred, strengths-based approach that helps people regain skills, confidence and independence rather than creating dependency. The cohort is adults 18 and over ordinarily resident in Hertfordshire, predominantly older people, plus people with learning disabilities, physical disabilities and mental health needs. NICE NG74 is the relevant standard for intermediate care including reablement.

The Council operates Reablement First, delivered without a Care Act eligibility assessment and non-chargeable for up to 4 weeks (28 days), extendable in exceptional cases by a further 14 days to a 6-week maximum. Entry criteria are 18 or over, resident in Hertfordshire, medically well enough to be at home, able to engage with a programme and SMART goals, and having reablement potential; exclusions cover end-of-life care, stable long-term needs with no realistic improvement, and cognitive impairment that significantly affects engagement.

Delivery runs 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, 7am to 10pm, with an out-of-hours on-call service from 10pm to 7am. Rapid packages start within 24 hours for hospital discharge or admission prevention, other packages within 48 hours, and a mandatory review within 72 hours of care starting sets the SMART goals. You will use the Council's Enablement web-based platform, moving towards a mobile app, to set and score those goals, working to the Hertfordshire Care Standard and Connected Lives principles throughout.

The Hertfordshire Care Standard binds you to a sustainable wage in line with the National Living Wage, paid sick pay, holiday pay, travel time and costs, training time, uniforms and DBS checks, a move away from zero-hours-only contracts, value-based recruitment, HCPA membership, adoption of the Skills for Care Care Workforce Pathway, and continuity-of-care caps on how many different workers each person sees. Providers also complete the Prevention and Enablement Standards self-assessment across 9 topics, rated Assured, Partially Met or Not Met.

Pricing: the £35.00 ceiling and the £13.83 floor

The commercial model is deliberately simple: a single blended flat rate per hour per lot, the same regardless of time of day, weekday, weekend or bank holiday. The hard ceiling is £35.00 per hour, excluding VAT, at a 2027/28 price base; bid above it and you fail. Travel time and mileage are fully included, so your rate must carry the cost of moving staff around a district.

Underneath the ceiling sits a floor. Each individual frontline care worker must be paid at least £13.83 per hour. This is not a service average, it is a per-person minimum, and sponsored (UKVI) staff must also meet the Government minimum. Live-in care is a fixed £1,250 per week.

Now the scoring maths. Because a 5% cut below the ceiling wins full price marks and further cuts win nothing, there is no scoring advantage to pricing below about £33.25 per hour. Dropping to £30.00 buys the same 10 price points as £33.25 while stripping out margin you need to fund the Hertfordshire Care Standard, the £13.83 floor and inherited TUPE costs. Price at or just below £33.25 and put the protected margin into quality.

Payment is on a block-hours basis, meaning guaranteed commissioned hours, invoiced 4-weekly in arrears. Complete a full cost build-up with every required cell filled, using £0.00 where a line is not relevant, because a blank cell is non-compliant. Indicative block hours vary widely, from about 8,164 hours a year in the smallest lot, Dacorum West, to about 33,319 in the largest, Watford, so lot selection drives your turnover stability and a portfolio of up to 4 lots should be built for that spread, not on geography alone.

TUPE and the reablement workforce

TUPE applies, and bids must be made on that basis; a non-TUPE bid is not accepted. The Council provides anonymised TUPE information per district, and a sample district workforce runs to roughly 117 staff, mostly permanent frontline care professionals with a supervisory tier, including a cohort on visa sponsorship, pensions via NEST, and widely varying contractual hours.

The winning provider inherits this workforce, onboards it onto the Enablement platform, lifts every individual to the £13.83 pay floor, and absorbs the full TUPE cost inside the £35.00 ceiling. There is no separate transition payment. Your rate build-up must reconcile inherited terms, the pay floor and the Hertfordshire Care Standard against a capped price, and if it does not work on paper it will not work in delivery.

TUPE is scored directly, inside the Mobilisation question, so evaluators want a costed, sequenced plan for consulting, transferring and onboarding real people, with a contingency for staff who do not transfer.

Mobilisation to the 1 April 2027 start

Contract commencement is 1 April 2027, with mobilisation from 15 January 2027. Bid Form 15, the Mobilisation question, carries 20% of quality and asks for a plan built around a Gantt chart covering TUPE, recruitment and a staffing contingency if not all staff transfer, implementation of the Council's Enablement platform, training and induction, risk management and communications.

Training expectations are specific, so name them against dated milestones: the Care Certificate at induction, the Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate, HCPA Prevention and Enablement training, and the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on learning disability and autism. A plan that schedules these reads very differently from one that gestures at full compliance.

In preliminary market engagement the Council floated banded rates for short visits and paying only for actual hours delivered. Providers pushed back, and the Council dropped both, landing on block-hour funding at a single flat £35.00 ceiling with the £13.83 floor. That signals what evaluators value: a stable, well-paid, dedicated reablement workforce, not a low-cost spot model.

How to reach the top scoring band

Because a 4 requires added value and a 3 does not, the whole strategy is a hunt for credible added value the Council has not asked for but will recognise: not padding, but the operational detail a real provider brings. How your 72-hour reviews actually set and score SMART goals, how you protect continuity of care worker against the team-size caps, and how you move people off reablement into reduced or no ongoing care.

Commit to the Schedule 2 KPIs in concrete terms, reported 4-weekly and RAG-rated; naming your target against each is itself evidence. Green thresholds include continuity of care worker at 80% or above, time-critical visits within 15 minutes at 100%, zero missed calls, provider-caused Section 42 safeguarding concerns at 0 to 2 per 10,000 hours, electronic call monitoring at 95% or above, satisfaction at 90% or above, block-hour utilisation as contact time at 70% or above, 72-hour reviews at 100%, and SMART goals uploaded within 72 hours at 100% and scored at least 3 times a week for more than 90% of people. CQC and PAMMS ratings are themselves KPIs.

Get the statutory framing exactly right; evaluators in this sector notice when it is wrong. The local authority makes, or causes to be made, a Care Act 2014 Section 42 enquiry; your role as provider is to secure immediate safety, record, refer, share information and support the enquiry, never to lead it. Where capacity is in question, show the Mental Capacity Act 2005 correctly: its 5 statutory principles and its 2-stage capacity test. Getting this right reads as the practitioner-led provider the Council wants.

Use the five questions as one system. Service Delivery (Bid Form 14, 4,000 words), Mobilisation (Bid Form 15, 2,500 words), Outcomes and KPIs (Bid Form 16, 2,500 words), Workforce (Bid Form 17, 2,500 words) and Partnership Working (Bid Form 18, 1,500 words) should tell one coherent story, with the separate Health and Safety response (Bid Form 10, 500 words) passing cleanly. Diagrams do not count towards the word limits, and over-limit words are not evaluated, so plan your evidence to sit inside the count.

FAQ

When does the Hertfordshire reablement tender close?

Submissions for HCC 09/26 close at 12:00 noon on 8 October 2026. Clarification questions must be in by 12:00 noon on 25 September 2026, and the Council will respond by 2 October 2026. The clarification window shuts almost two weeks before submission, so work back from those dates.

How is the HCC 09/26 reablement contract scored?

Quality is 80% and price is 20%. The 80% splits across five questions, with Service Delivery at 30% of quality the heaviest, and each marked 0 to 4, where a 4 requires added value beyond compliance. Price is scored on deviation from the £35.00 ceiling, not on being lowest, and scoring 2 or below on 3 of the 5 quality questions fails the whole bid.

Do I need a CQC-registered branch in Hertfordshire to bid?

You need to operate from a CQC-registered branch in Hertfordshire, or commit to establishing one on award, rated Good or above by CQC and/or PAMMS. You also need at least 2 years delivering reablement or enablement-focused support to adults 18 and over. These are pass/fail gates, checked before any quality answer is read.

How does TUPE affect the reablement contract?

TUPE applies and non-TUPE bids are not accepted. The winning provider inherits the existing district workforce, a sample district being roughly 117 staff, onboards them to the Enablement platform, raises every individual to the £13.83 per hour floor, and absorbs the transfer cost inside the £35.00 ceiling. TUPE is scored inside the Mobilisation question, so a vague transfer plan costs real marks.

How many lots can one provider win?

There are 11 lots, and a single provider can be awarded a maximum of 4. Each lot goes to one provider, and ties are broken by the higher quality score. Because indicative block hours run from about 8,164 a year in Dacorum West to about 33,319 in Watford, choose your lots for turnover spread as well as geography.

What is the lowest price worth bidding on this reablement services contract?

There is no scoring benefit below about £33.25 per hour, which is 5% under the £35.00 ceiling and already earns full price marks. Cutting further only erodes the margin you need to fund the £13.83 floor, the Hertfordshire Care Standard and inherited TUPE costs.

That is the real shape of the reablement tender 2026 from Hertfordshire: a fixed price, a hard pay floor, an inherited workforce and 80% of the marks sitting in narrative. HCC 09/26 will be won by the provider whose operating model is genuinely strong enough to earn the top band, and lost by the one that treats a capped price as a competitive weapon.