CPV 85 Health and social work services

About CPV 85

CPV 85 is the Common Procurement Vocabulary division covering health services, social work services, and veterinary services. It is one of the largest divisions by value in UK public procurement, and it is the division where the ordinary rules of competitive tendering apply least straightforwardly, because much of what sits inside it is commissioned rather than bought.

The division splits into two very different markets that happen to share a code. Health services, the 85-1 group, are commissioned overwhelmingly by NHS bodies: integrated care boards, NHS England, and individual trusts buying clinical services, out-of-hours provision, diagnostics capacity, and community health contracts. Social work services, the 85-3 group, are commissioned almost entirely by local authorities under their Care Act 2014 duties, covering residential and nursing care placements, domiciliary care, supported living, children's residential provision, fostering, and advocacy.

Suppliers frequently misjudge this division because they assume a single procurement regime governs it. It does not. NHS healthcare services in England moved to the Provider Selection Regime in 2024, a distinct set of rules that allows a commissioner to continue with an incumbent, identify a single suitable provider, or run a competitive process, depending on which of the defined routes applies. Local authority social care sits outside that regime and follows ordinary public procurement law, though most of it qualifies for the light touch regime with its higher threshold and lighter process requirements.

Active CPV 85 tenders

Live opportunity flow under CPV 85 is dominated by recommissioning cycles rather than new services. Adult social care frameworks are re-let on three to five year cycles by almost every upper-tier council in the country, and because these are usually multi-provider frameworks with no guaranteed volume, they open regularly to new entrants. Children's services procurement runs on a similar cycle but with far more regional collaboration, through consortia that place across several authorities at once.

Active sub-category	Typical procurement route	Primary buyer pattern
Domiciliary and home care	Light touch framework, multi-provider	Upper-tier council
Residential and nursing placements	Dynamic purchasing system	Council or regional consortium
Community health services	Provider Selection Regime	Integrated care board
Children's residential and fostering	Regional framework	Council consortium
Advocacy and support services	Light touch open procedure	Council or ICB

Top buyers procuring CPV 85

The buyer base divides cleanly along the health and social care line. On the health side, integrated care boards have absorbed most of the commissioning that clinical commissioning groups previously held, and NHS England retains direct commissioning for specialised services, primary care in some areas, and national programmes. In Wales, NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership operates as a central procurement function on behalf of the health boards, which makes it an unusually concentrated route into the Welsh health market compared with England.

On the social care side, the buyers are the upper-tier and unitary authorities, of which there are around 150 with social care responsibility. Councils in Scotland commission through integration joint boards that combine health and social care budgets, a structure with no direct English equivalent. Regional consortia are increasingly common in children's services, where individual authorities lack the placement volume to run an efficient framework alone.

Typical contract values under CPV 85

Contract values in this division span an exceptionally wide range, and the headline figure often misleads. Framework agreements for domiciliary care are frequently advertised with a large aggregate ceiling covering several years and many providers, while the realistic value to any single supplier is a fraction of it. A framework advertised at 200 million pounds across four years and forty providers is not a 200 million pound opportunity.

Individual placement contracts, particularly in children's residential care and complex adult packages, run at the opposite extreme: high unit cost, low volume, often awarded outside a framework through a spot purchase when no framework provider can meet the need. Community health contracts commissioned by an integrated care board typically sit in the low millions per year for a defined population. The largest procurements in the division are whole-pathway health commissions and county-wide care frameworks, which reach into the hundreds of millions across their full term.

Compliance and certifications for CPV 85 bidders

Regulatory registration is a precondition rather than an advantage in this division. Providers of regulated activities in England must be registered with the Care Quality Commission, and the current CQC rating is routinely used as a pass or fail gate in tender evaluation rather than as a scored criterion. The equivalent regulators are Care Inspectorate in Scotland, Care Inspectorate Wales, and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in Northern Ireland.

Beyond registration, buyers expect enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service checks for all client-facing staff, safeguarding policies aligned to local multi-agency arrangements, and evidence of compliance with the relevant national minimum standards. Health service bidders should expect information governance requirements including the Data Security and Protection Toolkit, and clinical services will attract requirements around clinical governance, indemnity, and named clinical leadership. Social care bidders should expect scrutiny of workforce pay, particularly around the real living wage and travel time for domiciliary staff, which has become a standard evaluation theme rather than an occasional one.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Provider Selection Regime and does it apply to me?

The Provider Selection Regime is the set of rules governing how NHS bodies in England select providers of healthcare services. It replaced the previous application of general procurement law to NHS clinical services. Under it, a commissioner can continue with an existing provider where that provider is doing a good job and the service is not changing considerably, can select a single suitable provider without competition where only one can realistically deliver, or can run a competitive process. It applies to healthcare services commissioned by NHS bodies and local authorities in England. It does not apply to social care, to goods, or to non-clinical services such as estates or IT, which continue under ordinary procurement law.

Why do so many social care opportunities appear as frameworks with no guaranteed volume?

Because demand is unpredictable and individual. A council cannot know in advance how many care packages of a given type it will need, so it establishes a framework or dynamic purchasing system of approved providers and then calls off against it as need arises. For a supplier this means framework approval is the beginning rather than the end of the sales process: winning work afterwards depends on capacity, geography, and the relationship with the brokerage team that places individual packages. Suppliers who treat framework admission as a win and then wait for volume are routinely disappointed.

How does the light touch regime change what I have to do?

The light touch regime applies to certain social, health, education, and cultural services and sets a considerably higher financial threshold before full procurement obligations bite. Below that threshold, buyers have far more flexibility in how they run a process. Above it, they must still advertise and must still treat bidders equally and transparently, but they can design the procedure themselves rather than following one of the standard procedures. In practice this means processes in CPV 85 vary far more between buyers than in other divisions, so a supplier cannot assume the process they saw last time is the process they will face this time.

Can a new provider realistically break into placements and packages?

Yes, but not usually by winning a large competition outright. The common route is admission to a framework or dynamic purchasing system, which many councils keep permanently open to new applicants precisely because they need capacity, followed by building a track record on smaller or harder-to-place packages. Specialisation helps considerably more than scale: providers who can take complex needs that general providers decline are placed quickly and repeatedly. A strong regulator rating and demonstrable staff retention are the two things commissioners look at hardest when deciding whether to use a provider they have not used before.