Charities bid for contracts worth £100m

A consortium of 700 charities is bidding for contracts worth £100m from the National Offender Management Service, the executive agency of the Ministry of Justice that seeks to prevent adult re-offending.

Third sector consortium 3SC has been invited to apply for contracts in every region in England and Wales after successfully passing the first stage of the bid process, the pre-qualifying questionnaire.

Michael O’Toole, chief executive of the consortium, said that the Noms bid was part of a move towards diversifying 3SC’s activities beyond welfare-to-work contracts.

“We’re looking not just at justice but also at health and social care,” he said. “We’ve concentrated previously on job provision, but this consortium was set up to bid in a number of different areas of public services.”

O’Toole said the consortium was likely to submit other bids after the Budget on 22 June, when government departments would be better placed to know what programmes they could offer.

The consortium, a not-for-profit limited liability partnership owned by a dozen charitable organisations, including the Social Investment Business, the Eden Project and Clinks, has previously won charities 7,000 jobs from the Future Jobs Fund. It has also submitted bids worth about £100m to two other government job programmes, the Community Taskforce and Progress to Work.

Set up in May last year, it already has an annual turnover of £45m.