Resources · Money
Building an uplift case a commissioner can act on.
The commissioner you are asking is usually not the person who decides, and they cannot take "we need more money" to anybody. Give them something they can carry.
Write it for the person you will never meet
Your request gets summarised by somebody else, for somebody else, in a meeting you are not in. Everything follows from that.
The commissioner you deal with may agree with you entirely and still be unable to help, because what they need is a case that survives being retold. If your argument depends on tone of voice, on the relationship, or on how hard the year has been, none of it makes it into the room.
What travels is arithmetic and consequence. What it costs you to deliver, what you are paid, what the gap is, and what happens to the service if the gap persists. Written so plainly that somebody who has never visited can repeat it accurately.
The second thing that travels is precedent risk. A commissioner who says yes to you has to be able to explain why, in terms that do not commit them to everybody else. Make your case specific to your costs and your service, and you make it easier to grant.
Start from your real numbers
The margin check gives you the per-week position an uplift case has to be built on. Without it the request is an opinion.
Three requests that go nowhere
All three are common and all three are avoidable.
The percentage with no working
A round number and a reference to rising costs. There is nothing for the commissioner to check, nothing to put in a paper, and nothing that distinguishes you from every other provider asking that month.
The threat
Hand back the package unless the rate moves. Occasionally it works. More often it changes the relationship permanently and moves you to the top of a list you do not want to be on.
The everything-at-once letter
Rate, invoicing, a dispute from last year and a complaint about assessments, all together. Each item makes the others harder to resolve. One ask, one letter.
What a workable case contains
Four parts, on no more than two pages, with the working attached separately.
Your cost per delivered hour, shown. Not asserted. The components, the period it covers, and the method. Somebody should be able to disagree with a line rather than with the whole thing.
The specific gap on this contract. Not your general position. What this package costs, what it pays, and the difference — for this commissioner's own work.
What the money buys them. Continuity, retention, fewer changes of carer, capacity they can rely on. Frame it as the outcome they are commissioning rather than as your survival.
What happens if nothing changes. Stated calmly and truthfully, without a deadline you have not decided to honour. A described consequence is credible; a bluff is discovered.
Ask for a meeting to walk them through it rather than a decision by email. Uplift decisions are made by people who need to be able to defend them, and half an hour explaining your costing does more than three follow-up emails asking whether they have had a chance to look at it.
Timing and process are local
Fee-setting rounds, uplift processes, contract review points and any published methodology vary by authority and by year. Find out that authority's own cycle and route rather than writing when it suits you.
An excellent case submitted three weeks after the budget was set has to wait a year. The same case sent before the round begins can be taken into it.
Ring us before it is urgent. It is a much shorter conversation.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. If you are preparing a case, we will tell you honestly whether it would survive being retold by somebody else.
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07426 919823If it is easier to write it down than say it out loud, send a message.