You're losing contracts to providers with better writers, not better care.
Local authority and NHS ICB contracts are typically scored 60:40 quality vs cost. That means your written submission is worth more than your price. Most care providers don't have a bid writer — they have a registered manager or director who stays up until midnight the week before deadline, writing a submission that doesn't do their service justice. Bid consultancies charge four figures per bid. Your agent reads the ITT, your policy library, previous winning bids, and your CQC reports — then drafts a scored, structured response.
What Your Agent Actually Does
Your bid agent drafts complete tender responses scored against the evaluation criteria — so you submit work that reflects the quality of your care, not the writing skills of whoever drew the short straw.
Analyses the ITT and evaluation criteria
Your agent reads the Invitation to Tender, identifies every scored question, maps the evaluation criteria, and structures its response to maximise marks. It knows that a 60:40 quality/cost split means your words matter more than your price.
Draws on your evidence library
Previous winning bids, CQC reports, policies, case studies, outcome data — your agent pulls in relevant evidence rather than writing generic claims. The bid reads like it was written by someone who knows your service, because it was trained on your service.
Writes to word counts and mark schemes
Tender responses have word limits and specific questions. Your agent respects both — no waffle, no going over, no missing the point of what the evaluator is actually asking for. Every paragraph earns marks.
Produces a review-ready draft with scoring notes
The draft comes with annotations: which evaluation criteria each section addresses, where evidence is strong, and where you might want to add specific examples. Your job is refinement, not creation from scratch.
The real numbers.
| Bid consultant fees (2–4 bids/year) | £3,000–£8,000 |
| Director/manager time on bid preparation | £2,000–£5,000/year |
| Lost revenue from bids not submitted or poorly scored | Variable — potentially tens of thousands |
| Realistic annual cost | £5,000–£13,000+ |
| Agent build (one-off, configured to your service and bid history) | £3,500–£5,500 |
| Monthly running costs (hosting + AI usage) | £150–£250/month |
| Updates as your evidence library grows | Included in first year |
| Realistic first-year total | £5,300–£8,500 |
The real cost of bad bid writing isn't the consultant fee you didn't pay — it's the contract you didn't win. A care provider delivering outstanding care can lose a tender to a mediocre provider with a polished submission. That's not fair, but it's how commissioning works.
Your agent doesn't replace your knowledge of your service. It makes sure that knowledge actually makes it onto the page, structured the way evaluators want to read it, with evidence where it counts.
Good fit / not a fit.
This works brilliantly for:
- Care providers bidding for local authority or NHS ICB contracts
- Organisations where the director or registered manager writes bids on top of their day job
- Providers who've lost tenders they felt they should have won
- Any care provider growing through commissioned contracts
This probably isn't for you if:
- You have an in-house business development team with dedicated bid writers
- Your contracts are all spot-purchased with no formal tendering process
- You're not planning to bid for new contracts in the next 12 months
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 look at a recent bid you've submitted — or one you're preparing for — and talk through your evidence library and what you've got to work with. Usually a 20-minute conversation.
hello@nimblecroft.com