The current financial climate is very challenging for Adult Social Care even though this area is a priority for the Coalition. ASC has been sharing the pain of reduced budgets and in some authorities Supporting People services have taken the brunt.

The Coalition has identified the use of procurement as one of the ways for authorities to maintain the current level of services and reduce costs – but what does this mean in practice? Increasingly authorities are looking at outsourcing in-house services as a way of reducing costs, although this process can take some time to achieve and may not elicit a sufficient response from the market.

Some authorities are exploring the use of framework agreements to procure social care services for vulnerable people. Framework agreements are familiar to local authority procurement departments, though mainly for procuring services such road maintenance and tree survey, or products such as stationary and photocopiers.

The use of framework agreements for the procurement social care services is a relatively new and innovative approach. Our work in developing framework agreements for social care has shown that they can considerably reduce price, increase quality, and provide an efficient process for procuring services. Up until recently framework agreements have tended to focus on the procurement of Supporting People services through block contracts, but this picture is now changing.

A new generation of framework agreements for social care is beginning to emerge that use multiple types of contracts for ‘calling off’ services and are compatible with the use of personal budgets. These frameworks aim to generate considerable efficiencies by integrating care and support services into a single procurement mechanism and at the same time substantially reduce the number of suppliers.

This can come as a bit of a shock to the provider market, particularly where there is an expectation that providers will form consortia or other types of partnerships to bid for preferred provider status. Organisations that have previously been in competition are required to make a commercial judgement about whether to work with competitors or risk not being accepted as a preferred supplier. This issue is placed in sharper focus where an authority adopts a generic approach to procurement – in other words providers are expected to show that they can work across all the care client groups.

One of the authorities we are currently working with is adopting a cutting edge approach to the use of a framework agreement. Not only is the authority integrating a number of different revenue streams for social care, including Supporting People enabling and personal care, it is also adopting a generic approach. Furthermore personalisation and choice is central to this approach and the framework agreement has been built around calling off services through using personal budgets.

Aligning costs savings with quality, choice and control is a difficult equation to get right; not only are there complex EU procurement rules to navigate, but there is also a need to engage effectively with the market. However framework agreements that integrate care and support services have the potential to deliver all these outcomes, provided that the market is carefully managed and they are used flexibly and creatively.