Custody & Justice

Kittle Group supported a FTSE 250 client with both rounds of their submission into the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for the operation of the 2022 Electronic Monitoring Field Service. The project represented an excellent opportunity for our client to become a strategic supplier for the MoJ, which would have significant long-term benefits. The contract is valued at approximately £300m.

This bid was a huge challenge for our client; though they had assembled a team of Electronic Monitoring experts to provide them with the necessary expertise, they had no existing material on electronic monitoring at the Selection Questionnaire (SQ) stage. Our team of Kittle writers worked at pace with each of the subject matter experts to produce a considerable amount of material in a short time. After successfully leading our client through the SQ, they requested our support for the Invitation to Tender (ITT) stage. A team of three Kittle writers coordinated interview calls with the client and key members of their supply chain – including working across time zones with subject experts in the USA – to understand and articulate their solution. Two weeks before the final submission, our company director stepped in to act as the client’s Implementation Workstream Lead. He provided consultancy, leadership, and writing support for the implementation response, drafting over 30 pages of narrative.

The client’s Bid Director was delighted with the Kittle team and said that our communication was “the best of any bid team he has ever worked with”. The client’s initial bid was successful and was down-selected to BAFO stage. The client received the highest score on quality at the second stage, but they were unsuccessful on commercial grounds.

Our client, a large FTSE 250 outsourcing provider, was bidding to take over a high-priority contract from a competitor. The bid was for the management, operation, and maintenance of the Gatwick Immigration Removal Centre, providing secure accommodation for high and low-risk detainees across two sites, Brook House and Tinsley House.

Our support extended across both the ITT, Negotiation, and Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stages and lasted 6 months. For this tender, we supplied a team of five writers, working closely with the client’s bid team of subject matter experts to storyboard each of the Home Office’s questions to ensure the responses reflected their proposed solution for the operation of the centres.

Our client’s dialogue with the Home Office during the Negotiation and BAFO phases, enabled our writers to highlight the added value our client was bringing to the contract in the responses and ensure that their win themes were consistently reflected.

The outcome was a successful bid for the client, winning a £200m contract with the Home Office.

We were commissioned by a FTSE top 100 client to support this strategically important bid for a contract with the Ministry of Justice. The service, valued at £800m, involved escorting adult prisoners and young offenders between police stations, prisons, and courts, and holding them securely in custody suites.

Kittle Group supplied a team that flexed to suit the changing demand throughout the 18-month project. This was a particularly complex bid because of the need to TUPE transfer over 400 staff and integrate them into an existing workforce of 500 and implement new IT systems. We, therefore, needed to articulate the client’s extensive capability and capacity to manage the mobilisation well without impacting on court and prison business, as evidenced by case studies. We worked closely with the Bid Director to take the responses through their solution governance, testing its effectiveness and benefits to the Buyer, and assisted the Commercial Director in joining up the narrative and pricing.

This was a successful project for the client, winning the £800m contract, their largest international contract to date.

‘Our success in this bid was very much a team effort, and you, Sam, Joel, Christian and the others were key members of that team. Thank you again for all the efforts, late nights and weekends that you put into getting the written submissions into a winning shape.’ -PECS Bid Director

We supported the preparation of a tender to the New Zealand Department of Corrections for the provision of electronic monitoring equipment and software for its programme of community offender management.

For us, this project had the added dimension of working across a consortium of three organisations in the USA, UK, and New Zealand. Our team worked collaboratively with the clients, across the different time zones, understanding their solution for the service.

We took feedback from the review process and refined the responses, cross-checking between them for consistency and compliance with the Department of Corrections’ requirements.

The New Zealand Department of Corrections called the tender ‘outstanding’.

A FTSE top 100 client commissioned us to support its tender for the operation and maintenance of the UK’s first resettlement prison in Northamptonshire. We supported our client in joining the Ministry of Justice’s Prisons Framework; through the Selection Questionnaire, Invitation to Negotiate (ITN), and Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stages.

Questions included: mobilisation; resettlement activities; developing health and social care with the NHS and Local Authorities; working with stakeholders; developing a new integrated IT system; facilities management; and recruitment, retention, and training.

This project lasted over 9 months, and we flexed the size of our team to meet the client’s needs throughout the project cycle.

A FTSE 250 company commissioned us to support the preparation of a bid for a highly-contested contract to operate a new immigration centre designed for women.

We used our extensive experience supporting custody contracts in the immigration sector to understand the Home Office’s requirements and work through them with the client to develop compelling narratives and responses to each bid question. We additionally ensured each response was evidence-based with the client’s capabilities and significant experience, and the value their service could bring to both detainees and the Home Office.

This was a successful project, resulting in a £70,000,000 contract win for the client.

A long-term client, a global outsourcing company specialising in providing health and people-focused services, requested support for their bid to the Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime (MOPAC). The contract was to manage the central referral mechanism and maintain the digital infrastructure of the London Victim and Witness Service ecosystem.

With a contract value of £15.4million, this was a high priority and large bid. A team of five Kittle writers used storyboarding interviews with subject matter experts to draft high-scoring responses. The Justice sector was new to our client, and they benefitted from Kittle Group’s experience winning bids in this area.

The stage in which Kittle supported our client was successful in advancing our client to the final round of tender submissions.  

One of our regular clients, a FTSE-250 outsourcing provider, reached out for our support with a bid into the Home Office. The contract they wanted to deliver involved the management, operation, and maintenance of two detention centres for 1,000 detainees across two large sites. This included the safety, security, and well-being of detainees, employment of 800+ staff, and maintenance of 10k+ assets.

Kittle provided a team of writers as well as our Managing Director, Alan Kittle, to be a Bid director for this ‘must win’ project for the client. As Bid Director, Alan led the client’s in-house team, with support from a small team of consultants, through solution and pricing development and governance.

His role also included advising the client on developing a new social value strategy for the contract, a highly weighted section by the Buyer and likely to be a key differentiator.  Alan also oversaw the Kittle team writing the narrative, giving advice, and assuring the quality of output at multiple stages of review.

The procurement process was unfortunately pulled by the Home Office after we submitted the bid. However, the client was extremely pleased with their submission and our input and has since worked with us again on successful Immigration Removal Centre bids.