To save on their commissioning costs, funders may have fewer but larger contracts, forcing smaller providers to have to bid jointly to win these. Having a general voluntary sector consortium:

• Provides a ready vehicle for such bids and pools resources and expertise rather than fragmenting through separate consortia struggling to be viable
• Enables tenders to be submitted on behalf of the sector in competition to larger commercial providers
• Provides a sector-wide mechanism for developing shared service design and potentially ‘pipelining’ with the statutory sector
• Enables economies of scale on some back-office functions rather than all providers trying to do this separately