The Single-Service Model Everyone Wrote Off Is Coming Back

For Reasons That Have Nothing to Do With Performance

The prevailing narrative in 2025 and 2026 has the market moving in one direction: from Total FM towards Integrated FM.

Look closely at some current public sector tenders, though, and lot-based single-service structures are creeping back not because anyone has decided single-service delivers better outcomes, but because the Procurement Act 2023 has quietly changed what a buyer is scored on.

MEAT becomes MAT

Section 19 of the Procurement Act 2023 replaced the long-standing requirement to award on the Most Economically Advantageous Tender with a broader standard: the Most Advantageous Tender. The change gives contracting authorities explicit legal room to weight non-monetary value in the award decision; local job creation, apprenticeships, supplier diversity, sustainability and SME participation among them.

Alongside it sits a duty on contracting authorities to have regard to the barriers SMEs and voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations face in winning public contracts, and to consider whether those barriers can be reduced.

Both provisions are, on their own terms, welcome. They give buyers a genuine mechanism to open up competition and route public spending towards outcomes beyond lowest price. Neither was written with FM contract structure specifically in mind. But FM procurement is where their side effects are landing hardest.

Why that pulls buyers toward single-service

A smaller, single-service lot is, for a genuine SME or a regional specialist, the most credible unit to bid and win. It carries a lower bid cost, a narrower scope, and a lighter balance-sheet requirement than an integrated multi-service contract. The scale of that gap is not abstract: typical bid costs for a mid-market supplier preparing a submission for a major integrated FM framework run to £30,000 – £70,000 or more, before a single call-off is ever won; a threshold few genuine SMEs can absorb, and one that a lot-based single-service structure sidesteps almost entirely.

Source: Bidding Ltd and Baachu Rain analysis of CCS framework bid economics, 2026.

A buyer chasing social value points therefore has a real structural incentive to break a contract into single-service lots specifically to create SME-winnable opportunities; even on an estate that might, on pure operational grounds, be better served by a bundled or integrated structure.

Model choice is starting to follow the scorecard, not the estate.

The risk this creates

Our own framework for choosing between TFM, IFM and single-service models rests on estate size, service complexity, internal capacity and risk tolerance not on how a given structure happens to score against a particular tender’s weighting. Fragmenting a genuinely complex estate into single-service lots purely to hit a social value target reintroduces the interface risk and the “that’s not our job” culture that fragmented procurement has always carried, for reasons entirely unconnected to whether that structure actually suits the estate.

This is not an argument against social value as a procurement objective. It is an argument against letting scoring mechanics quietly substitute for a genuine sourcing decision; which is precisely the kind of substitution that’s hardest to spot from inside the process, because every individual step is defensible and compliant.

A both/and answer, not either/or

Where an estate genuinely suits a single-service structure; smaller scale, distinct specialist requirements, sufficient internal management capacity the Procurement Act’s social value provisions are a legitimate reason to confirm that choice. They should not be the only reason it gets made.

Where an estate genuinely needs integration, social value does not have to be sacrificed to get it. SME and local-supply commitments can be built into a bundled or IFM tender as subcontracting conditions or lower-tier requirements, rather than assumed to require full fragmentation to earn the points. And the cleanest safeguard is procedural: score operational fit and social value as two separate, explicitly weighted evaluations, rather than allowing one to bleed silently into the other by default. That keeps the final model decision visible and deliberate; a judgement the buyer can defend on its own terms, rather than an accidental outcome of chasing a scorecard.

The Procurement Act 2023 gives buyers a genuine and overdue tool for opening up competition and directing public spend towards real social outcomes. What it should not become, quietly and by default, is a backdoor route to choosing your FM model by scorecard instead of by judgement about what the estate actually needs.

EMC Associates advises public and private sector clients on FM procurement strategy, tender design and model selection, including a free FM Tender Hosting Service for qualifying organisations.