Legal services

Tender description

The scope of this project is to provide the following services for Business Stream's customer base across Scotland and England: — Lot 1 — Debt Collection services. — Lot 2 — Legal Debt Recovery services. Lot 1 — Debt Collection Services It is anticipated that the Total Contract Value will be in the region of 1 500 000 GBP to 2 000 000 GBP over the 3 years for England and Scotland. The successful tenderer(s) will be required to provide the following services: — Debt Collection services for live and closed accounts; — White label early and/or late arrears collections. Past volumes of accounts allocated for external activity with Debt Collections Agents: DCA Volumes 2015 - 2016 Volume Value Total accounts: 16 105, 17 600 000 GBP. Live accounts: 11 860, 13 500 000 GBP. Closed accounts: 4 245, 4 000 000 GBP. Past volumes are not indicative of future volumes as Business Stream adopts a continuous improvement culture which will drive changes to the end-to-end recovery process. This may change the volume, value and timing of accounts being placed with a debt collection agent for trace or collect activity. The above volumes are solely based on Business Streams Scotland Customer base. Business stream want to work with flexible partners that can offer innovative and scalable solutions to meet our business challenges which include: — Being the provider of last resort which limits our ability to refuse to supply premises/customers which may be deemed as high risk; — Majority of our debt being linked to sole trader/SME accounts — Confirmation of the introduction of Vacant Premise Charging from 1.4.2018 — consultation paper is here http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0047/00477060.pdf — Shared supplies which prevents us from disconnecting the supply as the supply is linked to another business or domestic property; — Inheriting a customer base of c.100 000 customers of which 65 % are sole traders/SME customers; — Operating in England and Scotland. More than 1 supplier will be selected to provide Debt Collection Services but it is not expected that any more than 3 will be selected. Work will be allocated to the successful suppliers based on previous performance. The current methodology allocates a higher volume allocation of accounts to the highest performing supplier. The performance methodology used will be shared at ITT stage. Lot 2 — Legal Debt Recovery Services It is anticipated that the total Contract Value will be in the region of 2 000 000 GBP to 3 000 000 GBP over the 3 years for England and Scotland. The successful tenderer(s) will be required to provide the following services: — Litigation services for live and closed accounts; — Litigation services in Scotland and England; — Enforcement activity. Past volumes of accounts allocated for litigation: Legal Volumes 2015-2016 Volume Value Total accounts: 3 519, 5 700 000 GBP. Live accounts: 1 832, 3 600 000 GBP. Closed accounts: 1 687, 2 100 000 GBP. There were 170 active defended cases between April 2015 and March 2016. Past volumes are not indicative of future volumes as Business Stream adopts a continuous improvement culture which will drive changes to the end-to-end recovery process. This may change the volume, value and timing of accounts requiring litigation. The above volumes are solely based on Business Streams Scotland Customer base. Business stream want to work with flexible partners that can offer innovative and scalable solutions to meet our business challenges which include: — Being the provider of last resort which limits our ability to refuse to supply premises/customers which may be deemed as high risk. — Majority of our debt being linked to sole trader/SME accounts. — Confirmation of the introduction of Vacant Premise Charging from 1.4.2018 — consultation paper is here http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0047/00477060.pdf — Shared supplies which prevents us from disconnecting the supply as the supply is linked to another business or domestic property. — Inheriting a customer base of c.100 000 customers of which 65 % are sole traders/SME customers. — Operating in England and Scotland. — Capping liability where the account is live and occupied but the balance is under 3 000 GBP. More than 1 supplier will be selected to provide Litigation Services but it is not expected that any more than 2 will be selected. Work will be allocated to the successful suppliers based on their areas of expertise and specialism e.g. England, Scotland, Limited companies, sole traders etc. Business Stream wants to work with legal partners that can provide analytics and intelligence to determine the best litigation and enforcement strategy for our customer base to maximise collections. A key metric will be GBPs collected per GBP spent on litigation activity.