Responsive Repairs, Disrepair works and Vacant Property Services framework

Speed is one of the main reasons organisations use a framework rather than running a bespoke tender for every job. Because contractors are already procured and compliant, a direct award can move straight from an agreed scope of works to a contractor proposal and call-off, without a tender, an evaluation period, or a standstill period to wait out. For a genuine emergency, such as a security breach at a vacant building or a hazard requiring immediate attention, you can approach an eligible contractor directly for your region and lot, and many are set up to mobilise within hours rather than days for urgent work. The exact timescale depends on the contractor’s own emergency response commitments, which vary by lot and region, so it’s worth agreeing response time expectations as part of your call-off contract rather than assuming a single standard applies across all 75 contractors. For non-emergency but time-pressured work, a fast mini competition across a small pool of contractors on the relevant lot is usually still considerably quicker than an open tender, because the supplier pool, their pricing basis, and their compliance credentials are already established. Our team can talk you through realistic response timescales for your specific region, lot, and type of work, and help you build response time expectations into your scope of works from the outset.

Value band 1, which covers contracts up to £1.5 million per annum, is generally the better starting point for smaller organisations, and it’s specifically structured to work in your favour rather than as a lesser option. Because band 1 is reserved for contracts under that annual threshold, you’re competing for attention and pricing alongside other, similarly scaled requirements, rather than being a small fish in a pool of contractors geared up for national, multi-site programmes. In practice this often means working with regional or local contractors who know your area, can offer more competitive pricing for smaller volumes of work, and are more willing to build an ongoing relationship around your specific site or estate. It also tends to mean shorter mobilisation times, since these contractors aren’t juggling large national programmes. That said, band isn’t fixed to organisation type. A small charity managing a single, larger vacant building refurbishment project that will cost more than £1.5 million in a year would still need band 2 for that particular piece of work, even though its day-to-day responsive repairs might comfortably sit in band 1. Our team can help you work out where your actual spend sits before you commit to a lot.

Yes, the framework is registered for use by any UK registered contracting authority. In practice that means the same lots apply whether you’re dealing with an empty council office, a depot standing unused pending disposal, a community building in need of disrepair remediation, a school site with a maintenance backlog, or an NHS building awaiting reconfiguration. The lot structure, covering combined and standalone responsive repairs, refurbishment of unoccupied buildings, dedicated disrepair works, cleaning and clearing, security, and pest control, is built to flex to whatever type of building you’re managing, rather than assuming every job is a home. If you’re unsure whether your specific building type or scope of works fits neatly under one of the lots, that’s exactly the kind of thing our team can help you work through before you commit to a route to market. Get in touch with us to talk through your building type and requirement, and we’ll help you map it against the framework or point you towards a better fit if one of our other frameworks or DPS solutions suits your needs better.

In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the Procurement Act 2023 places significantly greater emphasis on transparency and evidencing value for money than previous legislation, including published pipeline notices, contract award notices, and for contracts above £5 million, annual KPI performance reporting. Scotland operates under its own separate procurement legislation, with equivalent transparency and reporting expectations. Using a pre-procured, compliant framework directly supports these obligations, wherever you’re based, because the framework itself has already been through an open, competitive procurement process, with the evaluation methodology, quality and price weighting, and supplier selection fully documented and available for audit. When you call off a contract under this framework, whether by direct award or mini competition, you inherit that compliant foundation rather than needing to run and document your own procurement process from scratch. Quantum then builds on this by tracking every obligation, document, and renewal date through the life of your contract, giving you a clear audit trail of what was agreed and what was delivered, which is exactly the kind of evidence transparency and performance reporting requirements expect you to produce. For organisations that are still building their internal response to changing procurement legislation, particularly those with limited procurement resource, using a compliant framework for reactive and disrepair work removes one significant category of risk from your wider compliance picture.

Yes. Multi-academy trusts don’t need to run separate call-off contracts for every individual school. Depending on how your estate is spread geographically, you can call off a single contractor under the appropriate regional lot to cover reactive repairs or disrepair works across multiple sites within that contractor’s coverage area, which is often more efficient than managing site-by-site arrangements, particularly for trusts without a dedicated estates or procurement function. Where your schools span more than one region, you may need more than one contractor to get full coverage, since regional contractors are appointed to specific areas rather than nationally, though several of the framework’s larger providers are appointed across multiple regions and could offer wider coverage under a single relationship. This matters for trusts centralising procurement across a dispersed estate, since it reduces the number of individual supplier relationships and contracts your team needs to manage, while still giving you access to contractors who understand the practical realities of working across school sites, including safeguarding and access arrangements during term time. Our team can help you map your trust’s estate against the framework’s regional lots to work out the most efficient contracting approach.

This is a common scenario, and the framework’s lot structure is designed to accommodate it. You have two practical options. The first is to call off a contractor under lot 3 or 4 for the general refurbishment work, and pair it with a separate contract under lot 7 or 8 for a contractor with specialist damp remediation expertise, giving you the right specialist for each element. The second is to manage the building as a single, larger scope of works and ask contractors bidding under a mini competition to demonstrate how they’ll coordinate refurbishment and disrepair remediation together, which can simplify contract management if you’d rather deal with one point of contact. Which approach works better depends on the scale and complexity of the building and how your organisation prefers to manage multiple contractors on a single site. If the vacant building also needs security while work is ongoing, lot 10 is available nationally alongside whichever regional lots you’re using for the repair or disrepair element. Our team can help you think this through before you commit to a scope of works.

This depends a little on how you approach it, since contractors on lots 1 to 8 are appointed by region rather than nationally. If your sites fall across, say, the North West and Yorkshire and Humber, the contractors available to you differ between the two, so a single mini competition can’t simply be issued to every contractor across both areas in one step. What you can do is run parallel mini competitions in each relevant region, which our team can help coordinate so it feels like a single process from your side even though the eligible contractor pool differs by area. Alternatively, if consistency across your whole estate matters more than getting the best fit for each region, it’s worth looking at the value band 2 lots first, since several of the larger providers appointed there operate across multiple regions, which may let you cover more than one area through a single contractor relationship rather than needing separate regional competitions at all. Which approach works best depends on how much you value a single point of contact across your estate versus getting the closest regional fit for each site. Our team can talk through your specific geographic spread and help you decide whether to run coordinated regional competitions or look for a multi-region contractor instead.

Alongside price and core service quality, contractors were evaluated on social and environmental impact as part of the 60% quality weighting, meaning every contractor on the framework has demonstrated a level of commitment in this area rather than it being an optional add-on you have to negotiate separately. In practical terms, this gives you a stronger starting position when you’re building social value or sustainability requirements into your own call-off contracts, since you’re choosing from a pool of contractors who have already shown capability in this area at the point of framework tender, rather than having to assess it from scratch during every individual procurement. This matters increasingly across the public sector, where social value considerations are a formal part of many contracting authorities’ own procurement policies, and where reporting on social and environmental outcomes is becoming a more visible part of board and public accountability. If sustainability or social value is a priority for your specific contract, whether that’s local labour and supply chain commitments, waste reduction during refurbishment work, or environmental standards for materials used in repairs, it’s worth discussing this with our team so we can help you build appropriate requirements and KPIs into your call-off documentation from the outset, rather than treating it as an afterthought.