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How Priority-40 works . the two tier systems that keep the portal defensible in front of any reader.
Last refresh . 30 August 2026
Both systems share the word Tier for a reason. Both operate on the same principle. Evidence has to earn the higher tier through provenance. A trust has to earn the higher tier through score.
40 plus 30 plus 30 is the whole in-house pool of 100. Together with the 109 trusts already outsourcing soft-FM they make up the 209 NHS trusts in England.
Named individuals on the Priority-40 register can withdraw or correct their record at any time. See Ethics . commitment 7.
Composite score 62 or above and still in-house. First-outsourcing candidates worked as active BD opportunities 2026-2028.
Named owner, warmth rating, signals tracked, composite score visible, every action logged.
Every in-house trust below the 62 boundary. First-outsourcing candidates worked as monitored opportunities 2028-2029.
Named owner but lighter cadence. Signals tracked, score visible, quarterly review.
Fails one of three exclusion rules at any score. Already outsourced, held by competitor or non-acute.
No named owner. Exclusion reason logged and searchable. Reviewed when a public signal changes.
Scores are refreshed quarterly from public signal ingest. A material change (chair change, deficit widening, PLACE score movement, transformation programme publication) triggers a score recalculation and, if the delta is large enough, a band move.
Evidence tier. Tier 1 is what we can say out loud. Tier 2 is what we know but do not quote.
Commercial tier. Priority-40 is where we are working. Watchlist is where we are watching. Out of scope is where a rule has failed.
Sodexo Priority-40 identifies the 40 NHS trusts most likely to consider first-outsourcing of soft-FM services in the current planning cycle. It sits inside a bigger structure. Around 209 trusts in England. Around 100 still run soft-FM in-house. Priority-40 is the top 40 of those 100 by a five-factor composite score covering finance, estates, governance, warmth and group pressure. Every other in-house trust below the 62 boundary sits on the Watchlist, around sixty trusts. Trusts that fail an exclusion rule sit Out of scope, around one hundred and nine. Everything visible on the portal is either publicly sourced (Tier 1) or internally logged with named provenance (Tier 2). Anything a client sees or a bid quotes is Tier 1.
The Methodology tab provides the full definition. The Governance page carries the operational rules for Tier 2 to Tier 1 promotion. Every signal on the Priority-40 register carries its source citation. Every trust has a named owner. Every relationship note has a named internal source. Composite scores are recalculated quarterly against public data. Audit trail is retained.
Six governance-cleared documents. Cleared for sharing with a trust colleague.
Chair . DoF . Chief Nurse . 5 pages
The national PLACE cleanliness average is now 98.6% and trusts sitting at 96% or below cannot close the gap by working the current model harder.
Chair . DoF . Estates . 5 pages
The Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 comes into force in April 2027 and almost every acute trust site in England sits in the enhanced tier.
Chair . DoF . Estates . 5 pages
About one quarter of the NHS operating carbon footprint sits inside the daily soft-FM operating model, not inside the capital programme.
Chair . Chief Nurse . Director of People . 5 pages
First-outsourcing conversations stall at the workforce concern and TUPE done well is the answer that lets a board make the decision in the open.
DoF . CE . Chair . 5 pages
Governed soft-FM outsourcing delivers a recurring in-year saving of the order of ten percent without cutting workforce and without cutting service.
Chair . DoF . Estates . CE . Chief Nurse . Director of People . 5 pages
Five priority NHS events for Chairs, DoFs and Estates Directors, with the audience, the reason it matters and how Sodexo is showing up.
Thirty independent and authoritative reports. Sodexo owns position one. Government strategy and the capital plan sit in the top ten because they set the funding envelope every trust works inside. The currency badge tells you whether a source is still safe to quote today. Competitor material now lives in the Competitors tab.
Sodexo UK Healthcare . 2025
Sodexo's own market view. States that approximately half of NHS acute providers outsource support services and sets out savings ranges by bed count. The Priority-40 pool is derived from this view.
Department of Health and Social Care . July 2025
The governing strategy every trust board is now planning against. Three shifts of hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention.
Department of Health and Social Care . 2026
Sets the capital envelope for estates renewal to 2035. Read it to understand what a trust can and cannot fund inside CDEL.
HM Treasury . June 2025
The revenue and capital settlement behind every CIP target on the Priority-40. The productivity assumption is the number trust finance teams are held to.
The King's Fund . 2025
The independent authority on NHS structure and finance. Confirms the provider count that sits behind the unoutsourced pool claim.
NHS England . October 2025
The trust-level estates dataset. Cleaning cost per square metre, backlog maintenance and soft-FM spend for every provider in England.
NHS England . February 2026
Published cleanliness, food and condition scores by site. The public measure a first-outsourcing business case has to move.
NHS England . February 2025
The standard every cleaning specification is written to. Functional risk categories, star ratings and audit frequency.
NHS London Procurement Partnership . March 2026
The buy-side view of the soft-FM market. Framework routes, pricing movement and supplier capacity as NHS procurement teams see it.
NHS Confederation . February 2026
How providers plan to deliver neighbourhood health estate at pace. Signals where new soft-FM demand appears outside the acute footprint.
Care Quality Commission . October 2025
The regulator's annual assessment. Read it for the inspection themes that make estate and cleanliness a board-level risk.
Nuffield Trust . 2025
Independent analysis of deficit drivers in the run-up to the spending review. Useful framing for a trust carrying a recurrent gap.
Nuffield Trust . 2026
Staffing, vacancy and turnover data including support services. The evidence base behind a TUPE and retention conversation.
Home Office . April 2026
Martyn's Law duties for qualifying premises. Directly shapes security, front-of-house and training scope in hospital soft-FM.
The King's Fund . April 2026
Independent read on how far NHS providers have moved on emissions. Frames the net zero line in any soft-FM proposal.
British Medical Association . September 2024
The critical case against outsourcing. Read it to know the objections a first-outsourcing board will hear from staff side.
Boston Consulting Group . 2025
Consultancy view of where UK health value is created. Useful language for a board that thinks in transformation terms.
McKinsey . 2025
Cross-government productivity framing. Supports the argument that support services are a productivity lever and not a cost line.
Deloitte . February 2026
Global operating pressures on health systems in 2026. Gives an external frame for a UK first-outsourcing conversation.
PwC UK . 2025
Long-range view of how UK health provision and its supply chain reshape to 2035.
EY UK . 2025
Sizes the public sector productivity opportunity. Useful when a CFO asks what good looks like outside health.
Accenture . November 2025
Where AI is landing in public service delivery. Sets the expectation trusts now bring to technology claims in tenders.
National Audit Office . 2024
NAO scrutiny of maintenance across public estate including the NHS backlog. Cite with the date visible.
NHS England . 2025
NHS England's own view of soft-FM cost trajectory and the productivity frame every trust CFO now works to.
NHS Providers . 2025
209 NHS trusts and foundation trusts in England. The definitive count of the sector and the denominator behind the pool.
Institute for Government . November 2025
Independent scrutiny of NHS performance against government targets. Sets the political frame for CIP conversations.
Office for Budget Responsibility . July 2026
The fiscal outlook health spending has to live inside. Read for the medium-term pressure on trust revenue budgets.
The Health Foundation . April 2024
Ranks technologies by staff time released. Supports a released-hours argument in a soft-FM proposal. Cite with the date visible.
CIPFA . September 2024
Finance profession view of capital and estate constraints. Cite with the date visible.
IPPR . 2024
Links population health to economic performance. Useful board framing beyond the cost case. Cite with the date visible.
Fourteen competitor reports held apart from the independent Market view. Every card ends with a Sodexo relevance line so the reader knows what to do with it in the field.
21 July 2026
OCS agrees to acquire Mitie for 218.5p cash per share, up to 221.6p including a final dividend, by Scottish scheme of arrangement, unanimously recommended by the Mitie board.
The two most active soft-FM bidders in UK health are merging into one integration programme. Expect distraction, TUPE and retention noise and customer-consent friction through 2026 to 2027, which is the window to win first-time outsourcing trusts on stability rather than price.
July 2026
OCS frames the deal as creating a UK-headquartered international FM group with deeper expertise in complex, regulated and mission-critical environments, healthcare named first among target markets.
OCS is positioning the enlarged group explicitly around regulated healthcare, so Sodexo bid narratives need to pre-empt a scale-plus-compliance pitch, and the OCS page carries no NHS proof points or figures, which is the soft spot.
June 2026
Mitie puts UK FM market growth at 2 to 3 per cent a year while its own revenue rose 10.5 per cent to £5,619m. Technical Services, which houses Healthcare, Local Government and Education, grew only 3 per cent to £614m and the NHS work cited is capital projects.
Mitie's NHS growth engine is hard-FM and project work rather than soft-FM service delivery, so on a first-outsourcing soft-FM tender Mitie cross-sells from a weaker base with no comparable patient-facing catering or portering story.
2026
FY26 revenue £5,619m, operating profit before other items £264m, free cash flow £162m and a record order book, with strategy set on extending FM leadership into facilities transformation and facilities compliance.
Margin and cash discipline plus a compliance-led acquisition strategy signals Mitie will bid technical compliance and capital works rather than cheapest soft-FM labour, so expect price competitiveness on soft-FM lines but limited appetite to buy share at a loss.
2025
OCS sets out cleaning, catering, portering, security, waste, maintenance and patient support across acute, community, mental health and secure settings, anchored to the national cleanliness standards, HTM guidance and ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001.
OCS leads on compliance credentials and heritage but publishes no contract values, savings percentages or outcome data, so Sodexo can win the same evaluation criteria by putting quantified PLACE, cleanliness star rating and CIP outcomes where OCS has adjectives.
2024
ISS builds its pitch on the £13.8bn maintenance backlog and 7,966 estates and facilities incidents in 2023/24, then answers with a £1.2m Hairmyres refurbishment in 24 weeks, 8,000 daily ServicePoint interactions, 2,300 nursing hours released and 120 frontline staff recruited and trained for Clatterbridge.
ISS is the sharpest competitor on released clinical time and single-point-of-contact service design, so Sodexo needs a like-for-like nursing-hours-released metric and a staff mobilisation number for first-outsourcing trusts nervous about day-one TUPE delivery.
December 2021
NHS sites spent about £9.5bn in 2018/19 of which soft FM was £3.2bn. Outsourced hospital cleaning runs about 7.5 per cent cheaper than in-house and each additional bid in a re-tender cuts lifetime cost 2.5 to 3.0 per cent.
This is the independent-looking evidence base a first-outsourcing trust board will accept and it is Serco-funded, so use the figures in business cases and be ready for the whose-research-is-it challenge.
24 November 2025
Healthcare and Senior Living is described generically as patient dining and cafés with no UK or NHS revenue break-out. UK revenue in the country of domicile was $4,218m against $3,461m in 2024. The FM expansion signal is the $343m acquisition of 4Service.
Compass and Medirest remain a catering-led player buying FM capability abroad rather than building integrated UK soft-FM, so on a bundled cleaning, catering and portering tender Compass is the narrowest of the incumbent four.
February 2026
Equans works the funding angle of CDEL constraints, the NHS England 47 per cent emissions cut by 2032 and the £10bn NHS technology plan, evidenced with a trust saving £88,000 a year and 96 tCO2e from stepped-down ventilation plus a bi-directional solar power purchase agreement.
Equans is attacking NHS estates through funded decarbonisation with hard numbers, so Sodexo should either partner on energy or bolt a credible net zero and CDEL-friendly funding line onto soft-FM bids before Equans owns the estates conversation.
2026
Survey of 110 senior FM decision-makers in the UK and Ireland. 97 per cent expect technology spend to rise, 95 per cent expect AI to deliver at least 10 per cent productivity gains by 2030, 57 per cent cite bandwidth and integration as blockers and 64 per cent blame poor training for technology failure.
The market is pre-committing to double-digit AI productivity gains that will show up as client expectations on price-per-year efficiency, so Sodexo should quantify its own technology-led productivity glidepath and sell mobilisation and training as the differentiator rather than the tooling.
2026
Mitie's own view of its healthcare position. FY26 revenue £5,619m with recent NHS wins named. Read to know where Mitie is winning and where the gaps are.
Confirms Mitie's soft-FM revenue exposure sits inside a broader mixed portfolio, so the Sodexo BD position is that we are the specialist for NHS soft-FM as a first outsourcing choice and not a generalist adding a service line.
2021
Serco-commissioned independent view. Estimates 45 per cent of NHS facilities management services are outsourced. Sits alongside the Sodexo half-outsource view as a corroborating data point.
Same underlying report as position 7, kept for continuity of citations in older Sodexo materials, so prefer the position 7 anchor for new bids.
2025
ISS World's own investor commentary on its UK healthcare position. Read to spot ISS competitive posture and pricing model in NHS bids.
Reads ISS group-level positioning of UK healthcare, so look for exit or scale-back language in the 2025 disclosures and pick up incumbent-adjacent conversations if ISS retreats from soft-FM.
2025
Compass Group's investor view of the Medirest healthcare position. Read for Compass strategy on hospital catering and integrated soft-FM plays.
The Medirest public narrative remains catering-led, so when a first-outsourcing trust wants a single integrated soft-FM provider Sodexo integrates the full soft-FM stack where Medirest is a bundled but partial answer.
Where the outsourcing conversation happens. Verified live at 30 August 2026.
London . Chair, CE, ICB
Sodexo Health and Care attending. No stand. Diary bookings via the portal.
London . Chair, CE
Chair-level network meeting. Attendance only and no supplier content.
Leicestershire . CE, Chair, Director
Executive audience. Two days of closed-door sessions.
Royal Armouries, Leeds . Estates, Director
Sodexo sponsoring a workshop session on TUPE done well.
London . Estates, DoF
Attendance aligned to the WP03 Net Zero conversation.
Manchester Central Convention Complex . Chair, CE, ICB, Director
Regional Director for Health and Care hosting one-to-one meetings both days.
Manchester Central . Estates, Chief Engineer, Head of Facilities
Sponsor and exhibit. Managing Director on a panel. Theme is Mind the Gap.
Birmingham . DoF, CFO, Finance
Attend and host the DoF roundtable dinner on 10 December.
NEC Birmingham . CE, CIO, Director
Attend and exhibit. Digital transformation and back-office integration.
London . Chair, CE, Director
Sponsor and table. Joint entry with a partner trust on governed first-outsourcing.
Leicestershire . CE, Chair, Director
Executive audience. Two days of closed-door sessions.
NEC Birmingham . CE, Director
Exhibit and present on governed first-outsourcing.
Manchester Central . Chair, CE, ICB, Director
Sodexo attending and exhibiting. Regional Director hosting one-to-one meetings both days.
London . Chief Nurse, Director of People
Present on TUPE done well and the workforce case for first-outsourcing.
London . DoF, CFO
Attend and present. Focus on the finance-director case for operating-model CIP.
Liverpool . Chair, CE
Chair and CE network. No supplier content but strong relationship touchpoint.
Manchester Central . Estates, Chief Engineer, Head of Facilities
Sponsor, exhibit and present. Theme continues the estates gap conversation.
Birmingham . Estates, Director
Follows the property conference. Useful for Martyn's Law readiness.
Birmingham . DoF, CFO, Finance
Attend and host the DoF roundtable. Focus on CIP without workforce cut.
Filter the register by how Sodexo is showing up.
19 events tracked. Additional events are added by the Sodexo team from the admin route.
Twelve invitation-only tables across the United Kingdom through 2027. Chatham House rule and no supplier pitch.
London . DoF, CFO
CIP without workforce cut
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Manchester . Chair, Chief Nurse
PLACE above the national line
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Birmingham . Chair, Estates
Martyn's Law readiness for acute estates
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Leeds . Chief Nurse, Director of People
TUPE done well
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Newcastle . Estates, DoF
The Net Zero contract
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Liverpool . Chair, CE
First-outsourcing and the board decision
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Bristol . DoF, CFO
Soft-FM productivity and the CIP gap
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Nottingham . Estates, Chief Nurse
Estates age and the cleanliness ceiling
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Cardiff . Director of People
Workforce retention through transfer
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Sheffield . Estates, DoF
Decarbonising the daily operating model
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Southampton . Chair, Chief Nurse
Governance the CQC can read
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Edinburgh . Chair, DoF
The 2028 deadline and what a board must decide
Invitation-only table of eight. Chatham House rule. Hosted by the Regional Director for Health and Care.
Ten targeted sessions through 2027. Each one is anchored to a governance-cleared paper.
Online . 45 minutes . Chair, Chief Nurse
Above the line. Moving from the PLACE median to the top decile
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Chair, DoF, Estates
Martyn's Law. What Chairs and DoFs need to answer
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Estates, DoF
The Net Zero contract. Soft-FM and the 2028 trajectory
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Chief Nurse, Director of People
TUPE done well. The workforce case
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . DoF, CE
CIP without workforce cut
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Chair, CE
First-outsourcing. What a board decides and when
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Estates
The estates gap. Backlog maintenance and soft-FM
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Director of People
Answering the staff-side question
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Chair, Chief Nurse
Visible governance and the CQC well-led domain
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
Online . 45 minutes . Chair, DoF
The road to 2028. A board readiness check
Live 45 minute session with a Sodexo Health and Care lead and a governed Q and A. Recording shared with registrants.
2 of 5 trust types covered by at least one LIVE Tier 1 artefact.
71 percent of LIVE artefacts are Tier 1. Aim for at least 60 percent Tier 1.
These trusts cannot yet be cited from Sodexo material in outbound work.
Named trigger with no drafting playbook in the library.