Telecommunications, Digital Inclusion and Internet of Things

Established in 2004, Procurement for Housing (PfH) is a national procurement consortium dedicated to the social housing sector and supported by the National Housing Federation (NHF), Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and HouseMark. Collectively our Members manage more than 75% of UK’ social housing stock, with PfH helping them to achieve efficiency savings using a wide range of services including framework agreements, spend analyses, strategy reviews, consolidated billing and comprehensive reporting.

PfH is a contracting authority under Regulation 2 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (“PCR 2015”) and a central purchasing body under regulation 37 PCR 2015

PfH has sought to establish a national Framework Agreement for Telecommunications, Digital Inclusion, Internet of Things and associated services.

The Framework will be awarded for an initial period of three years and may be extended for a further year (4 years in total)

The framework is intended to provide services and associated products relating to networking and security including cloud based solutions, voice solutions, unified communications, mobile communications and total communications, in addition to providing solution to support digital inclusion and solutions utilising the Internet of Things technologies.

For further information please refer to the procurement documentation.

Lot 5 provides members with solutions focused upon the provision of goods and services with the intention of enhancing digital inclusion within PfH Member’s Customer environment. Within this lot, the tenant is at the heart of the intended solutions, with the intention of improving accessibility to the internet with the purpose of enhancing tenant skills and capabilities in moving towards a digital operating environment. PfH members may choose to do this to support members with internet connectivity with the purpose of enabling tenants to search for jobs, apply for benefits, pay rent or other utilities in addition to enabling them to search for better value goods and services to them as an individual in addition to a host of other benefits, which may include staying in touch with family and friends via email or social media, reducing isolation and loneliness.

Whilst this lot is fundamentally about connectivity for the above benefits, other associated services are for the provision of training and upskilling of PfH Member customers, and therefore the applicable providers must be able to facilitate appropriate training solutions with the same overall aim, to improve digital inclusion.

The Successful Suppliers will be required to provide a full range of inclusive goods and service provisions either directly or via third parties, which will include installation, maintenance, disposal and any associated services and solutions including but not limited to associated software relating to; Community Connectivity, Site based, Community Wifi, Neighbourhood Wifi, Local Authority or other Wifi/WAN, The supply of hardware and connectivity, the provision of mobile connectivity on a BYOD basis.

Additional elements include but are not limited to; The provision of associated training and education services, to provide development and learning interventions. The provision of software of online solutions which will support in education solutions within the intention of increasing digital inclusion. Advisory services regarding appropriate grants and funding mechanisms.