Health and social work services

Tender description

The department wants to ensure that families receive, via internet or telephony, impartial, expert advice on family, child or education law. The provision of such advice and support benefits both children and their families by helping to prevent the avoidable escalation of issues; and by improving engagement of and experience with statutory children’s services. The department is looking to procure a service that provides: — information and guidance to users to enable them to resolve issues at the earliest possible stage, — creating more positive interactions for users, and enhancing the likelihood of positive outcomes, — independent, impartial, up to date, personalised and specialist advice on issues of child and family law and how to access support, — effective information and sign posting to families to sources if support, and — effective outcomes, whilst enhancing long term sustainability for families, making them less dependent upon central funding. The Specification in this document is designed to give you, as a potential supplier, some background and insight into what has been delivered in terms of a Legal family support service; and our expectations for the service going forward. The department wants to ensure that families receive, via internet or telephony, impartial, expert advice on family, child or education law. The provision of such advice and support benefits both children and their families by helping to prevent the avoidable escalation of issues; and by improving engagement of and experience with statutory children’s services. These services play a significant early intervention role in diverting people from over reliance on state services. The department is looking to appoint a supplier who will demonstrate via their responses that they fully understand and can meet the requirements outlined showing robustness and innovation but who will also work with us to develop and add value to the service. Current provision The Family legal advice helpline is currently provided by The Coram Children’s Legal Centre Ltd. The current telephone service is available from Monday to Friday 8:00 am to 6:00 pm excluding bank holidays. Email advice is available Monday to Friday 8:00 am to 6:00 pm with a 5 workday response time. The website is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The telephone service receives on average 7 000 calls per calendar month. Peak times for the phone lines are 9:00 am to 3:00 pm (up to 75 % of calls are received during this period) with a slight ease off after 3:00 pm. The existing telephone support service offers helpline support for complex matters relating to family and child law that cannot be resolved with the use of online material. This helpline operates using an 0300 number which costs no more than calls to geographic (01 and 02). Calls from landlines are typically charged up to 9p per minute; calls from mobiles typically cost between 8p and 40p per minute. There is also a call back services – where arrangements can be made to book a call-back from a member of the legal team, which is a paid-for service. The online support service/website has approximately 100 000 hits per calendar month and website use equates to approximately 98 % over the overall service provided. Approximately 13 000 fact sheets have been downloaded and the virtual assistant is utilised approximately 200 times per calendar month. The current Agreement expires at the end of September 2018. The department wishes to procure provision for 18 months (from 1.10.2018 to 31.3.2020). There cannot be a break in continuity of service between the expiry of the current Agreement and the new Agreement. There will be a need for a transition period to ensure that the current system transfers to the new system. This will take place during September 2018. Collaboration between the existing and new supplier will be required during that time. Bidders should provide a separate costed plan setting out how they would manage this transition period. The costed plan should include setup/ development costs for the service prior to 1.10.2018. The current supplier will be asked to resolve any ‘live cases’ at the time of transfer, but the continuing service is expected to be operational from day one for ‘new’ cases. Accreditation The existing Child Law advice service has been accredited by ‘the Helplines partnership’. Future operating model The department is looking to procure a service that provides: — information and guidance to users to enable them to resolve issues at the earliest possible stage, creating more positive interactions for users, and enhancing the likelihood of positive outcomes, — independent, impartial, up to date, personalised and specialist advice on issues of child and family law and how to access support, — effective information and signposting to families to sources of support, — effective outcomes, whilst enhancing long term sustainability for families, making them l.