The Light Touch Regime for Health and Social Care Under the Procurement Act 2023

The Light Touch Regime for Health and Social Care Under the Procurement Act

Health and social care services fall within the light touch regime under the Procurement Act, enacted in the previous year, 2023, which came into force for procurements started on or after February of the prior year, 2025. This replaces the earlier light touch regime under the EU-era regulations and introduces new procedural requirements including mandatory publication of notices on Find a Tender and assessment summaries in place of the old debrief letter system.

The practical change for providers is not in what can be bought, but in how authorities run the process and how you challenge if something goes wrong. The light touch regime gives buyers more flexibility than the full procedure, but not as much as most commissioners think. If you are bidding for community nursing contracts, domiciliary care, residential care, mental health services or similar contracts above the threshold, you need to understand what has and has not changed since February of last year.

What the light touch regime means in practice

The light touch designation applies to services listed in Schedule 3 of the Procurement Act. Health services, social care services, and certain educational services fall within this schedule. The threshold for triggering the regime is set by statutory instrument and updated periodically, so check the current figure on gov.uk before assuming a procurement is caught.

Once a procurement is caught, the contracting authority must follow the core transparency and equal treatment principles but has discretion over procedure design. They can run a direct award in some circumstances, use negotiation at any stage, and set their own timescales. However, they must still publish a planned procurement notice, a tender notice, and a contract award notice on the central digital platform. They must also provide an assessment summary to unsuccessful bidders explaining how the contract was awarded and why that bidder was not selected.

This is the critical shift for providers. The earlier regime under the EU rules required a standstill period and allowed bidders to request a debrief, but publication requirements were lighter. The Procurement Act inverts that. Everything is published by default, and you receive the assessment summary automatically. That summary must be substantive enough to allow you to understand the decision and decide whether to challenge.

The eight working day standstill and what you can do

After the authority notifies you of its decision, it must observe a standstill period of at least eight working days before signing the contract. This applies to light touch procurements just as it does to full regime contracts. The standstill starts the day after you are sent the contract award notice and assessment summary.

If you believe the authority has breached the Procurement Act, you have until 30 calendar days after you knew or ought to have known about the breach to start a challenge in the High Court. The automatic disclosure through the assessment summary means the clock usually starts immediately. In practical terms, you have between the receipt of the summary and the end of the standstill to take initial legal advice and, if you proceed, issue a claim and apply for interim relief to prevent contract signature.

Challenges are expensive and rarely succeed on procedural grounds alone unless the breach is clear. Evaluators know this. The assessment summary is written with one eye on litigation risk, so expect careful language and heavy reliance on the evaluation model published in the tender documents. If you want to challenge successfully, you need to show either that the published method was not followed or that the scoring was manifestly incorrect given the submissions. Proving the latter requires you to demonstrate not just that your answer was good, but that the scores awarded were irrational or unreasonable in the legal sense.

How evaluators actually score health and social care tenders

Most health and social care tenders under the light touch regime use a price and quality split, typically weighted between 60:40 and 40:60 depending on the complexity and risk profile of the service. Quality is broken into sub-criteria such as service delivery, safeguarding, workforce and mobilisation. Each sub-criterion is scored against a published scale, often zero to five or zero to ten, with descriptor statements for each score level.

Evaluators read your response to a question and assign it to a descriptor band. If the descriptor for a score of three out of five says "adequate evidence of processes with some detail on implementation" and your answer describes processes but gives no implementation detail, you receive a three. The evaluator does not have discretion to award a four because they liked your writing style. The assessment summary should, in principle, reference the descriptor language and explain which band your answer met.

In practice, the rigour of this explanation varies. Some authorities provide line-by-line commentary. Others give a single paragraph per criterion with general statements. The Procurement Act does not prescribe the format or length of the summary, only that it must be sufficient to understand the decision. If you receive a thin summary and want to challenge, you can request further particulars, but that request itself does not stop the clock.

Where providers lose marks is usually in failing to answer the question asked. A question about safeguarding asks how you will identify and escalate risk in the specific service being tendered. An answer that recites your corporate safeguarding policy and lists training courses will score in the lower bands. An answer that describes the scenario-based risks in this contract, names the escalation points by role and gives a worked example with timescales will score higher. Evaluators are instructed to mark what is on the page, not what they assume you can do.

Worked example: community nursing tender under the light touch regime

Imagine a clinical commissioning group, now operating as part of an integrated care board, runs a tender for community nursing services across three geographical patches. The contract value is approximately £4.2 million per year over five years. The procurement started in June 2026, so it is subject to the Procurement Act and sits within the light touch regime.

The tender uses a 60 per cent quality, 40 per cent price model. Quality is divided into four criteria: clinical delivery model (20 per cent), workforce and training (15 per cent), integration with acute and primary care (15 per cent), and mobilisation (10 per cent). Your bid scores 68 out of 100 on quality. The winning bid scores 74. On price, you are mid-table. Your overall score is 62.4. The winner scores 69.1.

You receive an assessment summary three days after the decision. It states that your clinical delivery model response was "good but lacked detail on patient flow between patches" and scored 14 out of 20. Your workforce response "demonstrated compliance but did not evidence innovative retention strategies" and scored 10 out of 15. Integration scored 11 out of 15 with a comment that you did not describe IT interoperability. Mobilisation scored 7 out of 10 with no adverse comment.

You now have eight working days to decide whether to challenge. If the tender documents defined the clinical delivery question as asking specifically about cross-patch flow and you did not answer it, you have no case. If the question did not mention cross-patch flow and the published scoring criteria did not list it as a requirement for top marks, you may have a case that the evaluation introduced undisclosed criteria. You would need to show that the scoring was outside the reasonable range and that, had the criteria been disclosed, you would have answered differently and scored higher.

Most bidders in this position do not challenge. The cost of interim relief proceedings starts at £15,000 to £25,000 in legal fees, and you must show a realistic prospect of success to get a hearing. The authority will argue that cross-patch flow was implicit in the service specification and that the evaluators applied a reasonable interpretation of the scoring model. Unless you can point to contradictory language in the tender documents or show that the winner's submission also lacked the cited detail but scored higher, the court is unlikely to intervene.

The interaction with NHS-specific routes

The light touch regime under the Procurement Act applies to contracts for health services. However, some NHS procurement is conducted under the provider selection regime, a parallel set of rules introduced in January of the previous year, 2025, specifically for health services by NHS bodies and integrated care boards. The provider selection regime takes precedence where it applies.

If you are bidding for NHS work, you need to know which regime applies to the specific contract. Integrated care boards often use CCS frameworks such as RM6291 NHS P23 or run standalone procurements. Framework call-offs are not subject to the light touch regime unless the framework itself imposes equivalent rules. Standalone procurements above the threshold are caught unless the provider selection regime applies.

In practice, this means reading the tender notice carefully. The notice will state the legal basis for the procurement. If it cites the Procurement Act and Schedule 3, you are in the light touch regime. If it cites the provider selection regime, different rules apply, including different timescales and remedies. We have written separately about NHS tender writing and working with NHS framework specialists if you need detail on those routes.

What to put in your evidence and how much

The assessment summary model means your written submission is the entire evidential record. Evaluators cannot take account of your track record, your reputation, or supplementary information you provide after submission unless the tender documents explicitly allowed for post-submission clarification or presentation.

Write to the word or page limit. If the question allows ten pages, use ten pages. If it allows 1,000 words, use 1,000 words. Evaluators expect answers at the upper limit for complex questions. A 400-word answer to a 1,000-word question signals either that you have little to say or that you misunderstood the scope.

Structure answers so the first paragraph directly addresses the question. If the question asks "How will you safeguard vulnerable adults in this service?", start with "We will safeguard vulnerable adults through three integrated mechanisms: staff training and supervision, risk assessment at every contact, and multiagency escalation." Then expand each mechanism with evidence. Do not start with background, context, or your corporate values.

Use specific examples tied to the service in the specification. If the service covers dementia care, give a dementia safeguarding example. If it covers learning disabilities, give a learning disability example. Generic examples score lower because evaluators cannot verify that you understand the specific risks.

Include measurable commitments where possible. "We will complete safeguarding supervision monthly" is better than "We will provide regular supervision." "Our mobilisation plan delivers full service on 1 April 2027, with shadow running from 1 March" is better than "We will mobilise promptly." Evaluators score specificity because it creates accountability.

Frequently asked questions

Does the light touch regime mean the buyer can do whatever they want?

No. The buyer must follow the core principles of equal treatment, transparency and proportionality. They must publish notices, provide assessment summaries, observe the standstill, and comply with any additional rules they set out in the tender documents. The flexibility is in procedure design, not in ignoring the law. If they breach the Act, you can still challenge.

Can I challenge a light touch procurement if I think the scoring was wrong?

Yes, but you must show a breach of the Procurement Act or the published evaluation method. A challenge based purely on your view that your bid was better will fail. You need to demonstrate that the scoring was irrational, that undisclosed criteria were used, or that the process was not followed. The assessment summary is your starting point for identifying a potential breach.

How does this affect care home providers bidding for local authority contracts?

Social care services fall within the light touch regime if the contract is above the threshold. Local authorities running tenders for residential or domiciliary care must publish notices, provide assessment summaries and observe the standstill. If you are an incumbent provider and lose a retender, you will receive an automatic explanation of why. This is a significant change from the earlier rules, where as of 2026 debrief is provided systematically rather than on request and is no longer perfunctory in most cases.

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