Youth education services

Tender description

The NCS Innovation Fund is a government sponsored initiative which has been established to allow NCS Trust and its partners identified pursuant to this procurement exercise to collectively challenge, learn and improve the way NCS services are designed and delivered in order to achieve NCS's wider objectives of greater social cohesion, social mobility and social engagement. The Trust is utilising the light touch regime under Regulations 74 to 76 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 ("the PCR 2015") in order to request expressions of interest from interested suppliers with a view to entering into contracts with the NCS Trust in order to run pilot innovation projects. The National Citizen Service ("NCS") was set up by government in 2011 to tackle some of the biggest social challenges in the UK. Through a wide range of community programmes and projects for young adults, it looks to build social cohesion, mobility and engagement. As part of this initiative, the NCS Trust ("the Trust") has established the Innovation Fund to support the achievement of better programme outcomes, by testing and evaluating alternative approaches to the provision of NCS Services. The innovation motivations are: (i) increasing the number of young people who sign up for and take part in NCS; (ii) improving the core components of the programme in terms of social impact; (iii) supporting greater value for money; (iv) enabling more vulnerable and harder to reach groups to benefit from the NCS services; and (v) improving the overall quality of programme delivery. The Trust is utilising the Light Touch Regime under Regulations 74 to 76 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 ("the PCR 2015") in order to request expressions of interest from interested suppliers with a view to entering into contracts with the NCS Trust in order to run pilot innovation projects. There will be a 2 stage process applied to the award of funding. Bidders may initially request the tender documents from the address provided under Part 1.3 and submit an Initial Bid by the deadline provided for within the Invitation to Tender. Those Initial Bids will be evaluated and the Trust anticipates inviting approximately 20 shortlisted bidders to enter into a dialogue stage. At the end of this stage the Trust will request Final Bids and following an evaluation period it will shortlist those bidders who (subject to Trust Board approval) will be allocated the funding. The funding available to the Trust for the NCS Innovation is set annually as part of the agreement with the Department for Digital, Culture, Medial and Sport ("DCMS"). Under this procurement exercise, the Trust expects to award up to 4 000 000 GBP preferably to up to 10 individual innovation projects. The final number of innovation projects to be awarded funding is however not determinable at the outset, given that the value of bids are not yet known. However, although there is no specified amount to be spent on a single innovation, ideally the Trust would not look to award more than 1 000 000 GBP per innovation project. The contracts to be awarded by NCS Trust under this procurement exercise will be subject to the "Light Touch Regime" pursuant to Regulations 74 to 76 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (the "PCR 2015") and as a result the PCR 2015 apply as limited to those provisions. Nothing within this Contract Notice or any other document issued pursuant to this procurement exercise shall be construed as meaning that the full scope of PCR 2015 applies nor is it intended in any way to create a contract (express or implied) that NCS Trust is conducting the procurement exercise in accordance with the full application of the procedure referred to within this Contract Notice, or PCR 2015. In particular, and without prejudice to the generality of the above NCS Trust has modelled this procurement exercise broadly on the competitive dialogue process pursuant to Regulation 30 of PCR 2015, however it is not bound by Regulation in relation to the operation of this procurement exercise or establishment of the NCS Innovation Fund.