RM6397 NHS Staffing Framework: Submissions Closed, and What Happens Next

Submissions closed at 3pm on Monday 21 September 2026. Evaluation runs from there to award, and the timetable is constrained at the far end rather than the near one: the agreement has to be in place for the February 2027 commencement, so award and the standstill period that follows it have to land before then.

If you submitted, there is still work in this period and most bidders do none of it. Keep the evidence you cited current, because anything you claimed at submission can be tested at verification or on the first call-off. Read your own response again against the published criteria while it is fresh, since the same weaknesses will appear in the next submission if nobody names them. And if the outcome goes against you, request the scoring feedback: it is free, it is the only objective assessment of your bid you will get, and most agencies never ask.

One honest note on the dates, carried over from before the deadline because it still governs what you should trust. Most published summaries gave the deadline as 21 September; at least one gave 22 September. The Find a Tender notice describes the term as running 3 February 2027 to 2 February 2031, while ITT summaries give commencement as 18 February 2027. The ITT on the Bravo portal is the only authority, and that remains true for the award timetable now.

First, the honest part: there is no way to submit a late bid, and we would not take money to attempt one. The portal closed and a framework competition run under the Procurement Act cannot accept a submission after the published deadline. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.

What you do have is a clock rather than a closed door. RM6277 expires in April 2027 and the clinical agreement in June 2027. Until then, an incumbent keeps supplying under the outgoing frameworks. After them, a supplier with no place on RM6397 has no framework route to NHS staffing work, and that is the real deadline you are now working to.

There are three routes worth assessing, and which one fits depends on your staff groups and your appetite. Subcontracting or supplying through an appointed managed service provider keeps NHS work flowing without a direct place, though on someone else’s commercial terms. Direct trust and ICB tenders, including work let under the Provider Selection Regime, sit outside RM6397 entirely and are often the better fit for a specialist supplier. And other staffing routes continue to be competed by NHS buying organisations and regional collaboratives across the term.

Check the agreement itself before you assume RM6397 is shut for four years. Some public frameworks allow a reopening window and some do not, and the published agreement is the only thing that answers it for this one. If a window does open, the work to be ready for it is the same evidence extraction that decides the outcome, so it is worth doing now rather than in the fortnight after an announcement.

Staffing framework evaluation is evidence-heavy rather than narrative-heavy. Evaluators are looking for demonstrable compliance against the NHS Employment Check Standards, clinical governance and revalidation arrangements, safeguarding, and hard operational performance data: fill rates by staff group, time-to-supply, escalation handling and audit results.

The pattern in weak submissions is consistent. They describe a recruitment process rather than evidencing an outcome, they quote capability without naming contracts, and they present figures the evaluator cannot verify. Extracting real numbers out of your operational systems and presenting them against the published criteria is most of the work, and it is why starting in the final fortnight rarely produces a competitive submission.

Glaxtons works on NHS framework submissions across the Workforce Alliance, the Provider Selection Regime, HSSF and ProCure, on NHS portals including Atamis and Jaggaer. Our success rate is 93 percent across more than 500 submissions.