The Provider Selection Regime (PSR) is a set of rules that governs how NHS England, NHS trusts, and local authorities procure healthcare services. Pennine Care is an NHS trust and so is included in the organisations that need to follow these rules. The types of organisations these rules apply to are known together as “relevant authorities”.
These rules have been in place from 1 January 2024, and they replace previous procurement rules, which were based on the Public Contract Regulations 2015.
Two of the new rules are about sharing information online:
- We need to share an annual summary of how we applied these rules, counting each time we followed a specific process, and
- We need to check that we have followed the rules and share information about how we will improve if there are areas that we find we have not.
The rules are called regulations, and each of these regulations has a number. We have included the number of the regulations that we are sharing information about here so that you can easily see which parts of the rules we are talking about if you want to look it up online.
We share this information every year, and it must be published by 30 September. This information relates to 12 months from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.
You can read more about the Provider Selection Regime on the NHS England website.
Provider Selection Regime rules apply to relevant authorities that are buying healthcare services from another organisation. The rules say to choose one of these five ways to pick a provider of the services:
- direct award processes A – must be used where there is an existing provider (or group of providers) for the service and that provider (or group of providers) is the only one capable of providing the service.
- direct award process B – must be used where there is unrestricted patient choice of provider for a service.
- direct award process C – can be used where an existing provider is satisfying its contract and the new contract will not be materially different from the current contract.
- most suitable provider process – can be used where the relevant authority cannot or does not wish to use direct award process C but is of the view that it can identify the most suitable provider.
- competitive process – can be used where the relevant authority cannot or does not wish to use direct award process C or the most suitable provider process.
There are also rules for making changes to contracts and making urgent decisions to award or change a contract.
As well as the rules about awarding contracts and making changes to them, there are also rules about sharing information in public about decisions that have been made, and organisations that think the contract could have been awarded to them can ask an independent group of people to have a look at the decisions we have made.
If a decision to award a contract is made using direct award C, most suitable provider, or the competitive process, the relevant authority must put a notice on a government website called 'Find A Tender'. This is to make sure that other organisations who might think they could have been given the contract can ask questions before the contract is actually awarded.
This is called a standstill period. Questions that the relevant authority gets asked during the standstill period are called Representations. The relevant authority must answer these questions.
There is also a group of independent people that NHS England has put together called the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel. After representations, if the organisation that thinks they could have been given the contract is not happy with the relevant authority’s replies, and thinks the relevant authority has not followed the PSR rules properly, they can ask the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel to look into this. The panel can then give the relevant authority advice about how they could make changes to how they have followed the PSR rules.
Regulation 25 – annual summary
Explanation of the Provider Selection Regime annual summary table
We need to share an annual summary which includes information about the number of contracts we have awarded, representations, Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel work, and how many different providers we have contracts with.
There are some things about this table which might need explaining:
- The date that a contract is awarded does not have to be the same date that we made the decision, or the same date as a contract starts. We call the date we wrote to the provider to tell them that we had decided to give them the contract the “award date”.
-
In the time period between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026 we made decisions about contracts that start 1 April 2026, but we did not write to the provider until after 31 March 2026, so these will be included in next year’s annual summary table.
-
In the time between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026 there are 20 providers that we have contracts with. That number doesn’t match with there being 15 contracts being awarded in the same year because some providers have got contracts with us of more than one year, so some of these are counted last year’s annual summary table.
Provider selection regime annual summary table
|
PSR Annual Summary |
1 April 2025 - 31 March 2026 |
|---|---|
|
Number of contracts directly awarded under direct award process A |
3 |
|
Number of contracts directly awarded under direct award process B |
0 |
|
Number of contracts directly awarded under direct award process C |
12 |
|
Number of contracts awarded under the most suitable provider process |
0 |
|
Number of contracts awarded under the competitive process |
0 |
|
Number of framework agreements concluded |
0 |
|
Number of contracts awarded based on a framework agreement |
0 |
|
Number of urgent contracts awarded |
0 |
|
Number of urgent modifications |
0 |
|
Number of Providers within the scope of PSR |
1 April 2025 - 31 March 2026 |
|---|---|
|
Total number of providers the relevant authority is currently contracted with |
20 |
|
Number of new providers awarded contracts |
1 |
|
Number of providers who ceased to hold any contracts with the relevant authority |
2 |
|
Representations |
1 April 2025 - 31 March 2026 |
|---|---|
|
Number of representations received in writing and during the standstill period in accordance with Regulation 12(3) |
0 |
|
Summary of the outcome of all representations received and of the nature and impact of those representations |
Not applicable |
|
Reviews by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel |
1 April 2025 - 31 March 2026 |
|---|---|
|
Number of requests for consideration received by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel |
0 |
|
Number of requests accepted by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel for consideration |
Not applicable |
|
Number of requests rejected by the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel for consideration |
Not applicable |
|
Number of times where the Independent Patient Choice and Procurement Panel advised the relevant authority to re-run or go back to an earlier step in a provider selection process under the PSR, and the number of times the advice was followed |
Not applicable |
Regulation 26 – monitoring requirements
Relevant authorities need to check if they are following the rules, and they must share the results of these checks online every year. This report should include the processes they used, decisions made under the PSR, changes to contracts, and how they handled conflicts of interest.
A conflict of interest is when a person might be influenced by relationships (family, friends) or other connections they might have to another organisation, which might make a decision they make be unfairly good for that other organisation.
Last year, Pennine Care used Mersey Internal Audit Agency (MIAA) to complete this Regulation 26 check on if we followed the rules. MIAA found that Pennine Care had “substantial assurance”, meaning that we have good systems in place to meet the rules, and we are usually following these systems. We have continued to follow the same systems that MIAA have checked.
- Do we have documents in place that help us to follow the PSR rules?
- Do we have good records of all the decisions that we made? Do these records show we have followed the specific rules of direct award C, most suitable provider or the competitive process?
- Do we have good enough processes to check if the providers are doing their jobs well?
- Do we have processes in place to find out about, and deal with, any conflicts of interest?
- Do we have a process to keep records of times we haven’t used PSR, and why we decided this?
- Do we have plans in place to share information online?
- Do we have a process in place to make sure we are telling ourselves how we are doing?
They also suggested that we:
- Make sure we have written rules about the meetings where we make PSR decisions, which need to include which staff make the PSR decisions and what their specific job is in that meeting (low risk).
- Make sure that all our contracts are signed (medium risk).
- Make sure we have plans to train any new staff who come to for work for us who will be involved in the PSR (medium risk).
- Finish a document that we have started to write to help us follow the PSR rules (low risk).
All of these suggestions have been completed.