DN597745 My Time Service

Tender description

MyTime is a service providing breaks for carers through innovative partnerships with a broad range of organisations predominantly in Liverpool. It is delivered by Local Solutions and forms part of the overall Liverpool Carers Centre offer. Whilst it is understood that MyTime is a service unique to Local Solutions that is not currently delivered by any other provider the aim is to reprocure all carers services during this contract period. Discussions between commissioners and procurement regarding how to progress these more specialist services are being progressed considering the new CSOs. It is likely that a Soft Market Testing questionnaire will be issued to assess and determine the potential market for this service. The pandemic has resulted in major disruptions to commissioning, primarily in regard to: ability of providers to respond to invitations to tender because of furloughed capacity or illness; redeployed capacity in the local authority or provider organisations into essential frontline functions to save lives during the pandemic and lack of access to specialist technical resource. This has built in a time lag to ordinary scheduled procurement and commissioning activity of up to 12 months, leading to review of contracts to identify the immediate and medium term actions required that have been impacted by COVID-19, in liaison with colleagues in the Commercial procurement Unit (CPU) and Legal Services. There are a range of contracts that have been identified which will require action to be taken in the form of either contract extensions, contract variations, exemptions to enable direct awards or continuation of the current service and competitive procurement exercises. The exemption requested in this report will enable the market to continue to stabilise, whilst the commissioning and procurement actions are underway.