Social care transport is won on the requirements.
And kept on the records.
The work you are losing
Taking older people and people with disabilities to where they need to be, home-to-school transport, journeys to day centres and community services. Continuous work, paid regularly and planned months ahead.
Often you are not losing it: you were never in it, because nobody explained that this work is awarded by tender and not by phone call.
Why you are not in it
Because a council does not choose whoever answers the phone best: it chooses whoever presents the requirements the way the tender asks for them, and then reports every month on what they have done. Price counts, but on its own it is not enough and it is never the first hurdle.
And because records are needed. Who travelled, in what vehicle, at what time, from where to where. An operator keeping that on a spreadsheet may well win, but at the first audit they spend a week reconstructing it.
What it takes to get in
Compliance you can put in writing
What works on UrbanGo are operators, and every driver is signed up and answered for by theirs. It is how the chain is built, not a certification we hand out, and in a tender it is the difference between being admitted and not being admitted.
Every journey leaves a record
Who, when, in which vehicle, from where to where. The journey record fills itself in when the job is closed and stays there: it is the work that today gets done by hand in the evening, and that nobody does gladly.
Reporting without rebuilding the month
The period’s journeys, by body and by service, with the amounts already worked out. A report that comes out of the work itself is also a report nobody can dispute.
How it works in practice
The body is a partner with its own arrangement and its own authorised people. The journeys stay on record and can be pulled back up, with the journey record already produced.
It is work that nobody moves over fifty pence, it lasts years and it fills the hours when the phone does not ring. It is worth the effort of the first tender.