The Nottingham City Council's Commissioning and Procurement Executive Committee convened on 9 September 2025, and agreed to establish an Emergency and Temporary Accommodation Open Framework Scheme. This scheme, with a maximum value of £27,214,972.00, aims to provide temporary accommodation for homeless households, addressing the council's statutory duties under the Housing Act 1996¹ and the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017².

Emergency and Temporary Accommodation Open Framework Scheme

The committee resolved to delegate authority to the Corporate Director for Growth and City Development to approve the establishment and operation of an Emergency and Temporary Accommodation Open Framework Scheme. The scheme will have an initial framework maximum duration of 3 years, and a final framework duration ending 8 years from the award of the initial framework, i.e. between 1 November 2025 and 31 October 2033, with a maximum value of up to £27,214,972.00. The Corporate Director for Growth and City Development is also authorised to award and enter into contracts to providers to be accepted onto the framework, and call-off contracts under the framework, utilising the annually agreed Emergency and Temporary Accommodation budget, subject to future council budgetary approval (General Fund budget), and government grant awards ringfenced or permitted for spend on homelessness and temporary accommodation between 2026/27 and 2034/35.

Councillor Jay Hayes, Executive Member for Housing and Planning, presented the report, noting that there are just under 900 households residing in temporary accommodation arranged by Nottingham City Council under a homelessness duty. The existing framework for the procurement of homelessness services has reached its upper value limit for the Temporary Accommodation Lot, necessitating an alternative process to continue procuring supply to fulfil the council's statutory duties at best value. An open framework scheme approach will be undertaken to establish a list of suppliers who have been assessed and verified in their ability to deliver in line with a defined specification, and with whom orders can be placed for individual services via a call-off process. The cost of the temporary accommodation is met through government grant funding.

The reasons for the recommendations were outlined as:

• The estimated framework value has been calculated through an assessment of ongoing and increasing demand, mitigated by enhanced homelessness prevention and resettlement activity.
• Nottingham City Council has a Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Prevention Strategy and targeted activity to reduce the number of households at risk of homelessness.
• The new procurement process will allow for the call off of multiple orders for different durations in groupings of volume and with size variations that meet the council's requirements.

The option of not developing a new procurement process for Emergency and Temporary Accommodation and using the Nightly Paid Emergency Accommodation framework and Click Travel as the primary procurement mechanism was rejected because without creating a compliant route to market the council would be unable to (re)commission existing and new supply of supported Emergency and Temporary Accommodation, which would result in a reliance on nightly paid options supplied by private providers, at significant additional cost to the council.

Equality Impact Assessment

An Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) was conducted, which also included the consideration of a Children's Rights Impact Assessment. The framework will support the council to meet its statutory homelessness relief obligations, providing equality of opportunity to all interested providers, quality of service provision and best value for the council through the use of a rigorous and robust criteria-led assessment process. The EIA identifies that the framework is not tailored specifically towards any particular group, but that it will ensure households groups with a priority need for homelessness services will continue to be positively impacted by providing an appropriate quality and volume of supported temporary accommodation that meet the needs of homelessness service users. Services procured through the framework will include support to address any potential issues that may arise as a result of a service user's ethnicity and nationality, including language barriers and discrimination. The Homelessness Strategy team consistently collects and monitors a variety of datasets relating to homelessness from its internal systems, contracted providers and key homelessness SIG partners, who are regularly consulted in order to determine changes in demand and need, issues, barriers and gaps to services.