In January 2026, LingvoHouse was awarded a place on the Crown Commercial Service RM6302 Language Services Framework — Lot 2, Translation Services.
I’m proud of it. Genuinely. Seventeen years building this company, and this felt like the right milestone at the right time.
But I want to talk about what it actually took to get there — because the version of this story that usually appears on LinkedIn (“delighted to announce…”) leaves out the part that might actually be useful to someone.
We started the process thinking it would take a few months
It took over a year.
I want to be precise about that, because when we began the RM6302 application process, we knew it would be thorough. Crown Commercial Service frameworks are the gateway to central government procurement. The due diligence is real. We expected rigour. What we underestimated was the sheer volume and specificity of what “rigour” means at this level.
The documentation requirements are extensive — not just in quantity, but in the depth of evidence required for each one. It’s not enough to hold ISO 17100, ISO 9001, and ISO 27001. You need to demonstrate how those standards operate in practice: your quality management procedures, your information security protocols, your workflow controls, your supplier chain management. Every claim needs an evidence trail. Every process needs to be documented and auditable.
For a boutique agency that runs lean — which is most of us in this sector — that level of documentation takes time to assemble even when the underlying practice is solid.
The moment we nearly paused the whole thing
Midway through the process, we hit Cyber Essentials Plus.
For anyone unfamiliar: Cyber Essentials Plus is a UK government-backed cybersecurity certification that involves an independent technical assessment of your systems. It sits above the standard Cyber Essentials certification and requires a hands-on audit — not just a self-assessment questionnaire.
We knew Cyber Essentials was part of the landscape. What we hadn’t fully mapped was that Cyber Essentials Plus would be a hard requirement for RM6302 — and that getting certified would take significantly more time and resource than we had budgeted for.
There was a moment where we had to have an honest conversation internally: do we pause, regroup, and come back to this in the next framework cycle? Or do we absorb the cost and time now and see it through?
We saw it through. But I won’t pretend it was a comfortable decision. For a smaller supplier, the resource required to achieve Cyber Essentials Plus certification while running day-to-day operations is not trivial. It demands focused technical work, system reviews, remediation where gaps exist, and coordination with an external certifying body. It took us longer than expected and cost more than we planned.
What I learned about what “public sector ready” actually means
There’s a version of “public sector ready” that exists on paper — you have the ISO certifications, you have the frameworks, you have the policies. And then there’s the version that central government procurement actually tests for.
The RM6302 process forced us to interrogate our own operations in ways that standard annual certification audits don’t. Not “do you have a data security policy” but “walk us through exactly how a document moves through your system from client submission to translator to quality review to delivery — and where does data touch at each stage.”
That level of scrutiny is uncomfortable. It’s also, I’d argue, exactly right. Public sector buyers are commissioning translation of sensitive materials — clinical records, legal correspondence, ministerial briefings, community public health information. They should be asking hard questions about the suppliers they appoint. The framework process is designed to do that filtering work upfront, which is why being on it carries real weight.
The other thing it clarified for me: the gap between a translation agency that has certifications and one that has genuinely built its operations around those standards is larger than most buyers realise. The application process surfaces that gap quickly.
Why we did it anyway
Pride, honestly. And seventeen years.
LingvoHouse was founded in 2007. I started it at 23, with no external funding, no partners, and no safety net — which is a longer story, but the short version is that I built this company from nothing because I saw a gap in the market and believed I could fill it properly.
Seventeen years later, we hold three ISO certifications, we’re on NHS SBS, ESPO, and NOE CPC frameworks, we won the UK Small Business Awards in 2024, and we’ve been named in the Slator Boutique Language Service Provider Index. Reaching RM6302 — Crown Commercial Service, the central government framework — felt like the natural next step. The one that says: we are not just a good small agency, we are a properly governed, properly certified supplier operating at the level central government requires.
That mattered to me. It still does.
What this means in practice for public sector buyers
If you’re a procurement officer, commissioning manager, or in-house counsel at a central government department, NHS body, or local authority — LingvoHouse is now accessible to you through RM6302 Lot 2 without a separate tender process.
The scope covers written translation and localisation across policy, operational, public-facing, clinical, and technical content, as well as machine translation post-editing and quality evaluation for organisations working with AI-generated translation output.
The full detail of what procurement through RM6302 involves — including direct award vs further competition — is on the LingvoHouse website. [link to the RM6302 supporting page]
And if you’re a smaller supplier considering a similar framework application: it’s worth it, the Cyber Essentials Plus is harder than it looks, and start earlier than you think you need to.
Tatiana Lapteva is CEO and Founder of LingvoHouse Translation Services Ltd, a UK-based professional translation and localisation company. LingvoHouse holds ISO 17100, ISO 9001, and ISO 27001 certification and is an approved supplier on the Crown Commercial Service RM6302 Language Services Framework, Lot 2.
Crown Commercial Service RM6302 Translation Services — Approved Lot 2 Supplier
All Translation Services for UK Councils & Public Sector Bodies
