6,500 words of evidenced content. 28 days. One annual panic.
The Provider Information Return lands once a year and demands 6,500 words of evidenced content across every area of your service. Most providers either pay a consultant £1,125+VAT to draft it or their registered manager disappears for a fortnight. Your PIR agent reads last year's return, your care system exports, incident logs, training matrix, and complaint log — then drafts a submission that's evidenced, structured, and ready for your review.
What Your Agent Actually Does
Your PIR agent assembles and drafts the entire Provider Information Return from your existing data — so your registered manager can focus on running the service, not writing about it.
Reads your existing data sources
Last year's PIR, care management system exports, incident and accident logs, training matrix, complaint and compliment records, staffing data — your agent ingests what you already have rather than asking you to fill in yet another questionnaire.
Drafts evidenced responses for every section
Each section of the PIR gets a structured, evidenced draft that references your actual data. Not generic statements about what you aspire to do — specific examples of what you've done, with numbers where they help.
Highlights gaps in your evidence
If a section lacks supporting data — maybe your training records don't cover a specific area, or your complaint log is thin — your agent flags it before you submit. Better to know now than to find out during inspection.
Tracks year-on-year improvements
Your agent compares this year's data against last year's submission and highlights what's improved, what's declined, and what's stayed the same. The narrative practically writes itself when you can see the trajectory.
The real numbers.
| Consultant PIR drafting fee | £1,125–£2,500 |
| Manager time briefing consultant and reviewing drafts | £500–£1,000 |
| Data gathering and evidence assembly | £500–£1,500 |
| Realistic annual cost | £2,125–£5,000 |
| Agent build (one-off, configured to your data sources) | £2,000–£3,500 |
| Monthly running costs (hosting + AI usage) | £80–£150/month |
| Annual updates as PIR format changes | Included in first year |
| Realistic first-year total | £2,960–£5,300 |
The PIR is one of those tasks that's genuinely important but only happens once a year — which means nobody builds a good process for it. Your registered manager dusts off last year's submission, spends two weeks gathering evidence, and writes the whole thing in a rush before the deadline.
Your agent makes the PIR a non-event. The evidence is already gathered, the draft is already written, and your manager's job is review and sign-off — not authorship.
Good fit / not a fit.
This works brilliantly for:
- Any CQC-registered provider completing an annual PIR
- Providers who've previously paid consultants to draft their return
- Registered managers who lose two weeks to PIR preparation every year
This probably isn't for you if:
- You have a dedicated compliance team with capacity to draft the PIR comfortably
- Your service is very small and the PIR is straightforward enough to do in an afternoon
- You're not CQC-registered (the PIR is CQC-specific)
Handled like the sensitive data it is.
Care records are special category data under UK GDPR, and we treat them that way. Your agent runs on Claude via AWS Bedrock with an EU-only inference profile — meaning prompts and outputs never leave the EU, and are never used to train a model. Protected under Anthropic’s enterprise Business Associate Agreement.
Every run is logged for audit, every output is a draft your registered manager reviews and approves, and your data lives in a tenant isolated from every other customer. We’re working towards NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit Standards Met and Cyber Essentials Plus, and we’ll hand you a pre-filled DPIA template you can drop into your own records.
Need UK-only data residency? We offer an Azure UK South deployment as an enterprise add-on for customers with stricter procurement requirements. Full security details →
Let's talk.
We'll start by looking at last year's PIR and your current data sources — what systems you use, what's exportable, and where the evidence gaps tend to be. Usually a 20-minute conversation.
hello@nimblecroft.com