Decision details

1.1West Lancashire Borough Council was awarded £4.25m UK SPF funding in 2023, to be spent on a variety of schemes across the Borough over 2023/24 and 2024/15.
1.2The West Lancashire Health and Wellbeing Partnership (WLHWP) has chosen three priority workstreams, one of which is health and housing. One project within this workstream is to offer healthy homes assessments (HHAs) to eligible people, whereby suitably qualified and trusted assessors visit people at home to look at the home environment and discuss / recommend what improvements could be made to the home to benefit the health, wellbeing and safety of the home occupier(s), to make minor adaptations where appropriate and consented, and to signpost the occupier(s) to relevant services available, should they wish to take up any of these services.
1.3A delegated decision was made by the Acting Chief Executive and Section 151 Officer on 11 December 2024 to approve expenditure of £25,000 UKSPF money for this project.
1.4Following a procurement process commencing in December 2024, three local organisations were invited to submit quotes for the work. We received:
•A quote for the work from Preston Care & Repair, a not-for-profit organisation based in Leyland which has recent experience of running similar HHA work nearby;
•A written response from HomeWise, based in Accrington, who advised they would not be submitting a quote.
1.5Under current Contract Procurement Rules (CPRs), the request for quotes must yield at least two written quotes. The Procurement Manager has confirmed that the written response from HomeWise, despite being a decline, can be treated as a written submission. The quotation provided by Preston Care & Repair was judged acceptable in terms of pricing. As such, the work can be awarded to Preston Care & Repair in compliance with the CPRs.
1.6 This decision is to approve the appointment of Preston Care & Repair to undertake the HHAs project.

To approve the appointment of Preston Care & Repair to carry out a Healthy Homes Assessment project in West Lancashire in a contract valued at £25,000.

The option to procure the provider for this project via a competitive tender process was considered, but given the nature of, and budget for the HHAs project, and given time constraints (i.e. the need to spend the UKSPF money by the end of March 2025, it was agreed to complete a request for quotation instead.