Stoke-on-Trent City Council has reopened its Supported Living and Social Opportunities Framework for Year 2 and Year 3 combined applications, with a deadline of 1 July 2026 and an estimated value of £146.2m across the agreement term. The framework covers learning disability, autism, mental health and physical disability cohorts and is procured under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Light Touch Regime (Regulations 74 to 77).

This guide breaks down the cohort split, the scoring battlegrounds, the most common reasons providers lose marks at qualification, and the playbook we apply on every Stoke-on-Trent and wider West Midlands supported living submission.

Tender at a glance: Supported Living and Social Opportunities Framework - Learning Disability, Autism, Mental Health and Physical Disability (ASCHIW/2021/132*). Contracting authority: Stoke on Trent City Council. Estimated value £146.2m. Deadline 1 July 2026. CPV 85000000 Health and social work services. Notice 051389-2026. Submissions via ProContract.

What is the Stoke-on-Trent Supported Living and Social Opportunities Framework?

The framework is Stoke-on-Trent City Council's procured route to commission supported living care and support alongside Social Opportunities (building-based day services and community-based outreach) for adults with a learning disability, autism, a mental health condition or a physical disability. This Year 2 and Year 3 combined reopening continues the original framework that opened in 2021 under reference ASCHIW/2021/132*, which is why the official notice carries the asterisk.

Two distinct service strands sit inside the same agreement:

• Supported Living. Care and support delivered into the person's own tenancy under Care Act 2014 Section 18 eligibility. Where the support includes regulated activity (personal care), the provider has to be Care Quality Commission registered.
• Social Opportunities. Building-based day opportunities and community outreach designed to reduce isolation, build skills and deliver the Care Act 2014 wellbeing outcomes. Some Social Opportunities provision sits outside CQC scope where no personal care is delivered.

The Council expects providers to qualify against the cohort and service strand they will actually deliver. Cohort drift between learning disability, autism, mental health and physical disability is a regulatory red flag.

What does the Council actually want from bidders?

We extract five binding constraints from the published specification:

1. Cohort and service-strand clarity. Every method statement has to be explicit about whether you are answering for the supported living strand, the Social Opportunities strand, or both, and which of the four cohorts (learning disability, autism, mental health, physical disability) your evidence covers. The Council treats vague cohort references as evidence of operational vagueness.

2. Workforce model and behaviour-that-challenges capability. The cohort includes "individuals who may show behaviour that can be challenges", which means the submission has to evidence trained Positive Behaviour Support practice, named clinical or behavioural specialist input, named team training pathways and a named escalation route. The Council references NICE NG11 challenging behaviour guidance and STOMP-STAMP principles for psychotropic medication reduction. Submissions that ignore STOMP-STAMP on learning disability and autism cohorts lose marks.

3. Mental Capacity Act and choice-and-control evidence. The supported living strand depends on tenancy rights, supported decision-making and least-restrictive practice. The submission has to mirror Mental Capacity Act 2005 language - capacity assessments, best interests decisions where capacity is absent, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards or Liberty Protection Safeguards routes, and named advocacy partners. Generic phrases like "we promote choice" without named MCA process score 2/5 at most.

4. Safeguarding and multi-agency working. The Council expects a named safeguarding lead, a clear referral pathway into the Stoke-on-Trent Safeguarding Adults Board, a documented complaints and feedback process, and an internal audit cycle. The submission has to evidence accurate wording on Section 42 enquiries under Care Act 2014 Section 42 and link to the Care and Support Statutory Guidance.

5. Wellbeing outcomes and quality assurance. The Council names the wellbeing duty, social inclusion outcomes and skill-building outcomes as the framework's purpose. The submission has to show how you measure outcomes - tools like the Outcome Star, the Recovery Star, a tenancy sustainment metric or a service-specific outcomes framework - and how you feed outcome data back into supervision, audit and care plan review.

What is the TenderLab perspective on this opportunity?

The framework is worth getting onto if Stoke-on-Trent and the wider Staffordshire and Cheshire footprint is a real geographic priority, your CQC registration position is clean for the personal-care elements, and you have the workforce depth to staff supported living tenancies and Social Opportunities sessions to the cohort split you intend to qualify for.

It is not worth pursuing if your nearest CQC-registered office is more than 90 minutes from the Stoke-on-Trent footprint, if your behaviour-that-challenges training is informal rather than evidenced, or if you cannot commit named capacity to qualify for both strands without confirmation of Year 2 and Year 3 referral volume.

Where the fit is right, the framework rewards consistency. Providers who score well in the reopening tend to see call-offs over the remaining 24 months as commissioners learn to trust the way you describe your service. A framework submission is essentially a long-form matching document. What you wrote when you joined is what the Stoke-on-Trent Care and Support Commissioning team reads when a person matches.

Across 200+ submissions in UK health and social care, our pattern recognition on supported living frameworks is that the highest-scoring submissions almost always name a single accountable manager, a single primary care planning system, a single supervision and reflective practice cycle and a single safeguarding lead. Generality reads as weakness. Specificity reads as operational truth.

What pitfalls lose providers marks?

The five we see most often on supported living and day opportunities framework submissions:

• Cohort drift. Writing one method statement that covers "people with support needs" without distinguishing learning disability from autism from mental health from physical disability. The four groups need different reasonable adjustments, different specialist staff competencies, different communication approaches and different positive behaviour support frameworks. Every paragraph has to be cohort-clear.
• Service-strand contamination. Mixing supported living workforce evidence into a Social Opportunities answer, or vice versa. Building-based day services run on different staff ratios, different shift patterns and different risk assessment models from supported living tenancies. The Council reads contamination as evidence the bidder does not know which service they are pricing.
• MCA and DoLS hand-waving. "We follow the Mental Capacity Act" with no named capacity assessment process, no best interests decision template, no DoLS or LPS referral route and no advocacy partner is not an MCA answer. The Council expects named operational mechanism.
• Generic PBS claims. "Our team is trained in Positive Behaviour Support" with no named PBS framework (BILD Positive Behaviour Support competencies, PBS Academy framework, Restraint Reduction Network standards), no headcount of trained staff, no supervision cadence and no STOMP-STAMP integration. The Council needs to see whether your behaviour-that-challenges capability is operational or aspirational.
• Missing wellbeing outcome measurement. Writing a generic outcomes paragraph that does not name your outcomes tool (Outcome Star, Recovery Star, service-specific framework), does not show how outcomes data is reviewed at supervision and audit, and does not connect outcome data to care plan review. The wellbeing duty under Care Act 2014 Section 1 is the statutory anchor; the submission has to measure it.

What is the win-rate playbook for getting on the framework?

Six approaches we apply on every comparable supported living framework submission:

1. Open every method statement with a 1-2 sentence direct answer. The evaluator scoring a supported living framework submission usually has dozens to read. Front-loading the answer means they can score against the rubric inside the first 100 words and read the rest as confirmation.

2. Name your operational mechanism in every paragraph. Named manager. Named system. Named PBS framework. Named supervision cycle. Named audit cadence. We track every paragraph against a 4-anchor pattern (Approach, Mechanism, Frequency, Outcome). If a paragraph cannot answer all four, it gets rewritten.

3. Mirror the Council's vocabulary. Where the spec says "Social Opportunities", say Social Opportunities. Where it says "behaviour that can be challenges", anchor to that exact phrasing. Where it lists cohorts, write your method statement to land on those cohorts in the order the Council named them. Evaluator pattern-matching is a real scoring lift.

4. Embed one verified case example per scored section. A named, anonymised, real supported living outcome reads as proof in a way that policy summary cannot. The example needs five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and an outcome quantifier. Our work on the Bedford Supported Living contract, for example, evidenced how a tenancy was sustained for a person with autism and behaviour-that-challenges through a named PBS framework, a named key worker, weekly reflective practice and a documented STOMP-STAMP review with the prescribing GP.

5. Show your QA dashboard. Where the platform allows attachments, include one redacted screenshot of your audit dashboard or outcomes scorecard. Framework submissions that include visible internal QA evidence consistently score higher than those that rely on policy text alone.

6. Submit the Tender Readiness Audit before you draft. Light Touch Regime reopenings reject submissions that fail qualification checks long before scoring begins. A short readiness audit catches expired CQC registration documents, missing PBS training records, outdated DBS process notes and missing cyber controls before the submission goes in. Cheaper than missing the reopening window.

What happens after qualification: mobilisation and call-offs?

Once you are on the framework, the Stoke-on-Trent Care and Support Commissioning team issues call-offs as individual people come up for placement. There is no guaranteed volume. The framework is call-off based on cohort match and Setting Plan fit, not fixed lot allocation.

The first 30 days after qualification matter. Set up your named Stoke-on-Trent locality lead, register on the Council's ProContract call-off route, agree your referral protocol with the Care and Support Commissioning team and the Behaviour Support service, and confirm your CQC-registered office position and Social Opportunities venue or outreach capacity for the cohort split you have qualified to deliver.

For each call-off, expect the commissioning team to send a referral pack with the person's Care Act assessment, indicative budget under Care Act 2014 Section 26 personal budget rules, identified risks and safeguarding history. Your turnaround on whether you can match the referral should be inside 5 working days. Slow responses move referrals to other providers on the framework quickly.

The post-go-live KPI regime is light by call-off volume but heavy by individual outcome. Expect a quarterly framework review meeting with the Care and Support Commissioning team, a documented care plan review inside the first 6 weeks of every placement, an annual outcomes review against the original Care Act assessment, and an annual framework review against the original submission.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Stoke-on-Trent Supported Living and Social Opportunities Framework open to new providers now?

Yes. The Year 2 and Year 3 combined reopening is open until 1 July 2026. New applications are assessed at the reopening point rather than at a single tender window.

Do I need CQC registration to apply?

If you intend to deliver supported living with personal care, yes. The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 require CQC registration for personal care delivered into a person's own home. If you are bidding for Social Opportunities only (building-based day services or community outreach without personal care), CQC registration is not required - but the submission has to be explicit about the service-strand split.

Do I need a Stoke-on-Trent office to qualify?

Not strictly. The submission needs a named mobilisation plan with a local recruitment route, a named locality lead appointment date and a credible explanation of how you will deliver supported living oversight, Social Opportunities sessions, supervision and emergency response across the ST postcode footprint. Providers more than 90 minutes from Stoke-on-Trent struggle to evidence credible response times.

How is the framework different from an approved list or a DPS?

A framework has a defined Agreement Term and a defined pool of providers, with reopening points across the term. An approved list operates similarly under Light Touch arrangements. A Dynamic Purchasing System has continuous entry across the term. The Stoke-on-Trent framework sits in the framework-with-reopening-windows category - defined term, limited entry points, and call-off based on cohort and Setting Plan match rather than fixed lot allocation.

What is the difference between the supported living strand and the Social Opportunities strand?

Supported living is care and support delivered into the person's tenancy under Care Act 2014 eligibility. It is staffed for 24-hour, waking night or visiting support based on the person's care plan. Social Opportunities is building-based day provision or community-based outreach designed to deliver wellbeing, skill-building and social inclusion outcomes. Some Social Opportunities provision is non-regulated (no personal care delivered); supported living with personal care is CQC-regulated.

What is the Light Touch Regime?

Light Touch Regime (LTR) procurement under Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Regulations 74 to 77 applies to health, social and certain other services where the EU has lower procedural requirements. Light Touch still requires transparency and equal treatment and still publishes via Find a Tender Service, but allows the Council more flexibility on procedure, scoring criteria and award method. The framework will be advertised, scored on quality and price criteria the Council sets, and awarded under LTR rules.

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Not sure where to start on the Stoke-on-Trent Supported Living and Social Opportunities Framework?

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Related content

• Supported Living tender bid writing services
• Learning Disability Services tender bid writing
• Mental Health Services tender bid writing
• Bid Writing Services for UK Care Providers
• Tender Readiness Audit
• Bedford Supported Living: how we secured the contract
• Live tender opportunities in adult social care

Further reading on the framework: Care and Support Statutory Guidance (gov.uk) | NICE NG11 Challenging Behaviour and Learning Disabilities (nice.org.uk) | STOMP-STAMP psychotropic medication reduction (england.nhs.uk)