I’m afraid I have some sad news to share across our Thrive Tribe family today. We now have the outcome of the tender we recently submitted for our Healthy Weight Programme in Oxfordshire, where you will be aware that we have been running Achieve Oxfordshire since Sept 2017.

Unfortunately, I must report that we have been un-successful on this occasion, and therefore the contract will move to Maximus from 1^st September onwards. We’ve been on a successful streak of bid wins in the last year, but despite submitting one of the best bids we’ve ever produced in Oxfordshire, we’ve been pipped to the post on this occasion. The quality aspects of the bid we’re exceptional, we scored 94% of the available mark and we were also marginally cheaper in price than the winning bid. This led to a 6.4% lead over Maximus for the price and quality aspects of the tender.

Social Value is a requirement of bids that essentially allows councils to attract additional value by asking bidders to pledge promises to bring wider social value to areas outside of the specifications of the programme. Good examples are pledges that cover employability, skills, training , environmental pledges, and volunteering hours within the community.  In this tender, social value was worth 16% of the total score, the highest % we have ever seen. Each bidder’s score was calculated based on the monetary amount of social value the organisation would bring to Oxfordshire. This wasn’t capped in any way, allowing Maximus – a much, much bigger organisation than Thrive Tribe - to offer £450,000 of social value. This was a lot more than we were able to offer, enabling Maximus to gain enough points to surpass our total score.

This is a disproportionally high social value bid by a competitor, one the like we’ve never seen before, and this combined with an un-capped scoring mechanism led to an unforeseen outcome. To give you some confidence, this is a unique situation, we have never seen a scoring mechanism of this sort on any other contract, including all our present contracts.

We’re so proud of what we have achieved in Oxfordshire, the Achieve service has always exceeded expectation. Our commissioners, this week, have congratulated us on how we’ve run the contract, referring to our achievements as being outstanding and thanking us for the support and innovation we’ve delivered to the people of Oxfordshire. Our healthcare partners are also full of plaudits, we have received lot of messages of support from many shocked stakeholders across Oxfordshire, all congratulating us for our achievements.

Our thoughts are with our team in Oxford, we met the team this week to share the news and we’re continuing to support them in various ways , we hope that some may be able to benefit from our current vacancies elsewhere in Thrive Tribe. We’ve agreed an exit plan with commissioners and will now focus on our commitment to the residents of Oxfordshire, continuing the amazing service until the end of August and looking back to celebrate our achievements over the last 7 years.

I’m sure the Oxfordshire team will be in your minds too, many congratulations and thank you to everyone who has worked in the service or supported Oxfordshire in any way over the years.

‍