What public buyers actually score in a bid

Losing a tender you were well placed to win usually comes down to one thing: answering the questions you wished they had asked instead of the ones they did. Public-sector evaluation is mechanical. Evaluators score what is in front of them against a published set of criteria and weightings, and the marks decide the outcome. Once you read a tender the way an evaluator will mark it, your responses change shape. This is how bids are typically assessed.

Stage one: selection, where you can only lose

Before anyone reads your method statements, you pass through selection, usually a Selection Questionnaire (SQ, the successor to the PQQ). This stage is mostly pass or fail:

• Financial standing. Accounts, and often a turnover requirement. As a rule of thumb buyers should not demand annual turnover of more than about twice the contract's yearly value, so a £150k-a-year contract should be within reach of a £300k-turnover firm.
• Insurance. Employers' liability (£5m is the legal minimum and commonly requested), public liability at the level the contract states, and professional indemnity where the work is advisory.
• Health and safety. For site-based work, SSIP membership through CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline or similar is the standard evidence. If the deadline is three weeks away and your registration has lapsed, deal with that first.
• Relevant experience. Usually two or three contract examples of similar scope. Public-sector examples score reassurance even when they are not formally required.
• Mandatory exclusions. Convictions, tax issues, grave professional misconduct. Answer honestly; a false declaration is far more damaging than most disclosures.

Selection earns you nothing except the right to be evaluated. The winning happens at award stage.

Stage two: award, where the weightings do the work

The ITT states how quality and price are split. Service contracts commonly land around 60/40 or 50/50 in either direction, and the split should steer your effort. On a 70/30 price-weighted contract, a beautiful method statement cannot rescue an uncompetitive rate. On a quality-weighted one, shaving pennies off a unit rate matters less than a credible delivery plan.

The quality questions that recur

Across public-sector ITTs, the same themes come up again and again:

• Mobilisation. How you go from award to full service, with dates: recruitment or staff transfer, systems set-up, site or service familiarisation, schedule build. Vague mobilisation answers score badly because bad mobilisations are what buyers fear most.
• TUPE, where an incumbent workforce transfers. Evaluators want evidence you understand the process and have priced it. Treating the TUPE annex as an afterthought is one of the most expensive mistakes in service tendering.
• Staffing and supervision. Team structure, qualifications, cover for absence, peaks in demand. Name real roles and real ratios.
• Quality monitoring. How you inspect your own work, record it and put failures right before the client finds them. Concrete evidence trails and a named escalation route read well because they are checkable.
• Environmental management. Emissions, waste routes, energy use and the obligations specific to your sector. Buyers increasingly score carbon regardless of contract size.
• Safeguarding, where schools, care settings or housing are involved: DBS checks, conduct rules, and how staff are briefed.
• Data protection and security, where the contract touches personal data or systems: UK GDPR arrangements and, increasingly, Cyber Essentials.
• Social value, weighted anywhere from 5 to 20 per cent. It is a big enough topic that we cover it separately, but the short version: specific, local, deliverable commitments beat generic goodwill.

How to write for marks

Most ITTs publish a scoring ladder, typically 0 to 5, where the top marks require a response that is relevant, evidenced and detailed. In practice:

• Answer the question asked, in its own structure. If it lists four things to address, use four headings.
• Make it contract-specific. Naming the actual sites, systems or services in scope signals you have done the legwork; recycled generic text signals the opposite and evaluators recognise it instantly.
• Evidence every claim. "We inspect completed work" scores less than describing who inspects, how often, what gets recorded and what happens on a fail.
• Respect word limits and formats. Over-limit text is routinely disregarded.

Price: complete, consistent, sustainable

Pricing is usually a schedule of rates against the specification. Three things trip bidders: incomplete schedules (a blank line can make the whole bid non-compliant), internal inconsistency (a quality answer promising weekly visits against a price built on monthly ones), and unsustainably low rates, which buyers can query as abnormally low and which hurt you for the whole contract term if accepted.

After the result, ask why

Win or lose, request feedback. Under the current rules you receive an assessment summary showing how your bid compared with the winner. Losing scores tell you exactly which answers to rebuild, and two or three cycles of that feedback loop is how mid-table bidders become consistent winners.