Provision and Support of the 101 Single Non-Emergency Number (SNEN)

Tender description

The Home Office (HO) intends to undertake a procurement process to appoint a suitable body to manage, operate and administer the 101 Single Non-Emergency Number. The provider will be responsible for the set-up, maintenance and up-keep, development to maximise value for money, and suitable provision of resilience of the national components of the service. The purpose of this Prior Information Notice (PIN) is to alert potential suppliers to an opportunity and to elicit clarification questions regarding the 101 service. Lot 1: The Authority intends to extend the current automatic speech recognition (ASR) capability from recognition of police force or relevant location for the sake of matching the relevant police force, to allowing natural language descriptions of the purpose of call to be automatically routed in accordance with pre-defined categorisations and associated call routing options. This automated triaging of calls would need to allow configurable routing by police force, and would need to be continually developed to improve performance of the speech recognition. The Authority welcomes views on useful definitions and measures to define the service requirement in a manner which would enable descriptive bids and implementation/delivery plans to be developed against this requirement. Consideration is being given to wider contact management integration across police forces and potentially with other public sector bodies, and to triage non-police calls to other numbers outside the remit of the 101 SNEN (with sufficient management information to enable the Authority to recharge organisations receiving these calls). Consideration is also being given to integration with existing digital measures, where these are available. This could take the form of extended non-voice contact approaches such as text-based “chatbots” or text-based webchat provisions for non-smart phone users. The Authority would also welcome views on the approaches to overcome these challenges presented around identifying caller location information to the end call handlers in the context of VOIP, SIP trunking and the sunsetting of PSTN. The Authority places high value on Social Value and welcomes views on how social values could be applied to the delivery and management of the 101 SNEN service. The high-level requirements for these are identified as requirements in the attachment, but the Authority would welcome views on standard measures or definitions which could be included in the requirements to best enable alignment of bids to the target outcome of the requirements. A market engagement event which will be held during the afternoon of Monday 8th February 2021. In light of current COVID-19 safe working patterns, it is anticipated that this event will be hosted by the Home Office over Skype for Business. If you wish to attend, please contact PPPTcommercial@homeoffice.gov.uk to reserve a place. Attendance at the market engagement event is limited to 2 people per organisation which will be required to complete a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and return to PPPTcommercial@homeoffice.gov.uk prior to the event. Electronic invitations will be sent out closer to the time. One-to-one individual sessions will also be available during the week commencing Monday 1st February until the event. Please indicate whether you would like to reserve a meeting with the project team. Any other questions can be directed to PPPTcommercial@homeoffice.gov.uk and will be addressed at the market day. Closing date for expressing interest in attending the market engagement event will be 26th January 2021. Additional information: A document of Description of Requirements and anticipated Service Level Agreements is available on request from PPPTcommercial@homeoffice.gov.uk