Council CAFM procurements have a habit of starting with a vendor demo and ending with a procurement officer asking why the chosen route does not match the contract value. The routes are not interchangeable. Each has its own threshold, its own evaluation rules, its own timelines, and its own way of treating social value, accessibility, and incumbent risk. Picking the right one early saves a quarter.
G-Cloud
G-Cloud is the most common route for CAFM procurements above the threshold. It is a Crown Commercial Service framework with three lots: cloud hosting, cloud software, and cloud support. CAFM platforms like Jarsis sit in cloud software. Suppliers publish a service entry with pricing, capabilities, and security accreditations. Buyers run a structured shortlist, evaluate against published award criteria, and award without a full OJEU-equivalent procurement.
The advantages are speed and breadth. A G-Cloud procurement can be run in six to eight weeks from shortlisting to award. The framework is broad: most credible CAFM vendors are listed. The disadvantages are scoring rigidity, a maximum contract length of three years (with one two-year extension on the current iteration), and the requirement to score everything against the published award criteria, which can flatten genuine differentiation.
G-Cloud works best when the requirement is well understood, the field of vendors is mature, and the council wants a defensible audit trail without inventing one. It is less good for transformative programmes where you want a longer contract and bigger discovery effort.
CCS frameworks beyond G-Cloud
Several CCS frameworks include CAFM-relevant lots. Estates Professional Services and Facilities Management Marketplace cover service-led FM purchasing where software is bundled with delivery. Technology Services frameworks cover bigger system integration engagements. Each has different scoring rules, different supplier panels, and different expectations of supplier maturity.
The advantages over G-Cloud are usually contract length, programme support, and the ability to wrap implementation services into the same agreement. The disadvantage is speed: a typical CCS framework procurement takes longer than G-Cloud and the supplier pool is narrower. If your programme is a transformative deployment with significant change management, the trade often makes sense.
Direct award under threshold
For smaller pilots or single-module deployments under the council's thresholds, direct award is the fastest route. It is also the one most prone to being challenged. The paperwork looks lighter, but the audit standards do not. A direct award still needs documented value-for-money justification, and it still needs to be defensible against a supplier who feels they were excluded.
Direct award works well for proof-of-concept or single-site pilots that prove the case before a fuller procurement. Many councils run a £30,000 to £50,000 direct-award pilot, document the outcomes, and use that evidence to anchor the full G-Cloud procurement that follows. That sequence is lower-risk than picking a vendor on a brochure.
Social value scoring
Public sector procurements now weight social value at a minimum of 10% under the Social Value Model. Councils routinely set higher weights, often 15-20%. Software vendors who treat social value as a copy-and-paste attachment lose points; those with a credible commitment to local employment, environmental impact, or supply chain resilience can win on it. The scoring is not gameable from a template, and the panellists notice.
If you are writing the procurement document, set the social value weight explicitly and require evidence rather than statements. Vendors who can describe how their actual operating model delivers social value, with measurable commitments, score well. Vendors who write generic ESG sections do not.
Accessibility scoring
Public sector accessibility regulations require WCAG 2.2 AA across the user-facing parts of the platform. This includes tenant portals, citizen request forms, and engineer-facing mobile apps where applicable. The scoring weight should be explicit, with evidence required: an Accessibility Conformance Report, a published accessibility statement, and a willingness to demonstrate the platform with a screen reader during evaluation.
Vendors who can produce a current ACR and a real accessibility statement save you from the surprise audit three years in. Those who cannot, often cannot for a reason: the platform was not built with accessibility as a first-class concern, and retrofitting it is not cheap.
Practical RFP language
The phrases worth using in a council CAFM RFP look almost obvious in retrospect. Specify outcome verbs, not feature lists. "Resolve a tenant repair within statutory window, with photographic evidence and SLA escalation," not "Service Desk module with SLA tracking." Demand demonstrability: vendors should show the platform doing the thing during evaluation, not describe it. Require plain English answers in the technical response: if a vendor cannot explain their architecture in two paragraphs, they probably do not understand it themselves.
Insist on UK data residency, GOV.UK One Login readiness, ATRS records for any AI features, and a written DPIA template. None of these are unreasonable. Vendors who struggle with them are telling you something useful.
Council CAFM, demonstrated
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