The Home Office requires a supplier with the capability to deliver operational research skills (see list of skills at the bottom of this advert) for border and immigration system operations and policy over a currently undefined period. The supplier will work alongside data scientists, statisticians, social researchers, economists, and operational analysts in the Home Office to support its policy and delivery teams.
Through this contract, the Home Office seeks to provide specialist analytical surge capacity to ensure that quick turnaround analytical requests can be actioned and used to drive evidence-informed policy, and so that the department reacts quickly to changes in the political and operational landscape of the UK border and migration policy. The exact scope and timing of service requests will depend on the Home Office’s priorities during the contract period. Indicatively, services may be requested for between 3 weeks – 3 months, and HOAI may want to mobilise resource with 2 weeks’ notice. Consequently, we are seeking a supplier that can not only provide these services, but also has the capability and the capacity to work at pace, provide services at short notice and respond to requirement changes.
The supplier is not required to provide managerial oversight. HOAI would like to contract analysts at HEO / SEO equivalent grades (SFIA Level 2-3), that would work to a permanent civil service SEO / Grade 7. The number of FTE required for each project will vary, but is likely to be between 1-5 FTE. Suppliers will need to have SC government clearance as a minimum, and access to Home Office IT systems.
The Home Office are open to a range of models offered by suppliers, including:
- Consortium bids
- Single supplier bids covering all professional skills
- Single supplier bids in which very specific professional skills are contracted out to trusted freelancers / suppliers.
At the pre-market engagement event, the Home Office would like to understand whether:
- Suppliers are able to provide the operational skills outlined below
- Any of the models outlined above are preferred
- Suppliers are able to mobilise resource with 2 weeks’ notice
- There is a maintenance fee associated with surge support contracts, or whether the contract would work off of a daily rate card.
Operational research skills include simulation / scenario modelling, forecasting, quantitative data analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, coding (Python and R), creating analytical pipelines and dashboards, decision analysis, frontier analysis, problem structuring, soft systems modelling, optimisation, data mining and economic business case support. The supplier should have personnel that are skilled in each of these areas.
Heather Cover-Kus
Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.
Raya Tsolova
Raya Tsolova is a Programme Manager at techUK.
Cinzia Miatto
Cinzia joined techUK in August 2023 as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager.
