Voluntary and Community Sector - invitations to bid

The available grant funding is £186,425 (exc. VAT) payable across the project period by instalments to be agreed.

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, on behalf of itself, Sheffield City Council, Doncaster City Council and Barnsley Borough Council is seeking to appoint a lead organisation from among voluntary sector providers to collaborate in delivering the project detailed below.

1. Requirements for a successful partner

It is expected that the successful partner organisation will be an estabilished and expeienced not for profit voluntary and community sector (VCS) provider, with a substantial understanding of the needs and challenges in the operation of a shared lives service.

This project will be required to commence in May 2024 and complete at the end of June 2025 inclusive of the evaluation period.

2. Background and policy context

Shared Lives services are considered a critial component in developing adult services across several care groups, and it is a model that has had significant success.

In its Roadmap for reforming care and support in England published in the summer 2023, ADASS identifies Shared Lives as a priority growth area.

The roadmap sets the ambition to commission more capacity in household models such as Shared Lives and continue to develop and trial new models of care in homely environments.

The Department of Health and Social Care’s Adult Social Care White Paper – ‘People at the Heart of Care 2021’, also identified Shared Lives as an exemplar of good social care and hails it as an innovation in its Next Steps to put ‘People at the Heart of Care 2023 – 2025’ plan.

Shared Lives has a track record of offering personalised care and support options and an alternative to supported housing and residential support.

3. Accelerating Reform Fund - DHSC

In October 2023 the DHSC launched the Accelerating Reform Fund (ARF), £42.6m to stimulate Adult Social Care innovation in the areas of growth of person centred care, increased support to unpaid carers, address rising demand, and to address barriers to adopting innovative practices and build capacity and capability.

4. Consortia

At a sub-regional level, the ARF funded programme of work will be delivered through a consortia of participating local authorities Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield, Rotherham and partners involving people with lived experience at the core.  The Shared Lives Project will be supported by the allocated ARF confirmed in March 2024.  The programme will be supported by the Social Care Institute of Excellence in developing, scaling, embedding and, monitoring and evaluation of the project.

5. The Opportunity

There is now a commitment from participating partners to work across South Yorkshire to scale up the Shared Lives offer, and we require a partner organisation from the voluntary sector to share good practice in order to achieve the following outcomes:

• Increase the service offer to include people with a range of disabilities and needs including people living with mental ill-health, dementia, younger people transitioning to adulthood and supporting people providing unpaid care to take short breaks and respite
• Overcome the challenges of Shared Lives Carer recruitment.
• Enhance the matching of Shared Live recipents of Shared Lives Carers.
• Comprehensive and efficent referral process.
• Promotion of the service and employment opportnity through appropriate marketing
• Explore reasonable Shared Lives Carer pay, terms, conditions and a training offer to achieve a stable, confident and competent resource in order to provide good quality provision which meets demand.

6. Project Aims and Ambition

The outcomes are expected to be acheived through system and process redesign and working with relevant partners to: 

• Map and review existing system and processes
• Map ideal care pathways
• Identify areas for improvement in systems and process
• Support the implementation of new best practice processes, such as referral forms, matching, and introduction processes
• Development of new models of support 
• Apply an agile, co-design methodology, convene cross groups of key stakeholders to design and test out the key components on new models of Shared Lives support.
• Take into account local contextual issues through managers, officers and leaders to implement the models in their local authority areas.
• Review, consider and recommend best practice approaches to planning and managing transitions.

7. Funding

The Grant will be used to:

• Secure the partner organisation's expert advice, support, and resource to bring about the above aims and ambitions
• enable the partner organisation to produce, resource, and execute a delivery plan (approved by the Shared Lives Board) and provide associated reports schemes in a timely way.

Additional consortia funding:

The Consortium will have access to additional funding to facilitate project delivery in the area of co-production, additional officer and project manager support and additional project elements.

8. Monitoring and Evalutation

The resulting service level agreement will set out the obligation of the parties including the way in which the grant will be used and how monitoring and evaluation will take place. If money is not spent as agreed to fufill the service requirements then the Council will recover any monies in accordance with the agreement.

9. How to apply

If you wish to apply to provide support services to enhance the shared lives offer please complete the form below:
Community & Living: Apply for the grant to provide support to increase and enhance the shared lives offer. | Provide support & enhance the shared lives offer. – Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council

Your response should include:

•  Your oganisation name, address, and contact information.
• You name and position in the company
• A written statement addressing the criteria. Please structure your response under the 3 headings as shown in table 2 below.

The closing date for applications is 19th April 2024.

The panel will evaluate applications in week beginning 22nd April 2024 and applicants will be notified of the panel’s decision by 3rd May 2024 or sooner.

The successful provider will be expected to begin delivering the service in May 2024.

Prior to commencement, the successful provider and the Council will enter into a Grant Agreement which will include terms and conditions and a service specification, to be agreed by both parties.

If you have any questions, please direct these to commissioningenquiries@rotherham.gov.uk

Table 1: Scoring

Table 2: Criteria & Weighting