A public tender is not read and considered. It is marked, question by question, against published criteria, usually by a panel who score independently and then moderate.
That is very good news, because a marking scheme is a document you are given in advance. Most losing bids are not beaten by a better company. They are beaten by a company that read the marking scheme and wrote to it.
Most advantageous tender
Under the Procurement Act 2023, contracts are awarded to the most advantageous tender. Under the old regulations it was the most economically advantageous tender, and dropping "economically" was deliberate: it signals that price is not required to dominate.
It is a signal, not a rule. Buyers still choose their own weightings, and plenty still put price at 60% or higher. But an award on lowest price alone is now harder to defend, and quality and social value have firmer ground to stand on.
Reading the weighting table
Every competition publishes a split. Something like:
- Price — 40%
- Quality — 50%
- Social value — 10%
with the quality half broken down further:
- Service delivery and methodology — 20%
- Mobilisation and implementation — 10%
- Staffing, training and retention — 10%
- Quality assurance and performance management — 10%
Read this before you decide to bid at all, and read it as a budget for your own time.
If methodology is worth 20% and mobilisation 10%, the methodology answer deserves twice the effort. Suppliers routinely spend the most time on the question they enjoy writing rather than the one carrying the marks.
The other thing the table tells you is whether you can win. If price is 60% and you know you are 15% more expensive than the incumbent, you need near-perfect quality scores to close the gap. Sometimes the honest answer is to put the week into a different competition.
Reading the scoring matrix
Alongside the weightings sits the matrix that defines what each score means. A typical 0–5 scale:
| Score | Typical wording |
|---|---|
| 0 | No response, or completely fails to address the requirement |
| 1 | Poor — significant concerns, little evidence |
| 2 | Weak — partially addresses the requirement, gaps remain |
| 3 | Acceptable — meets the requirement with adequate evidence |
| 4 | Good — fully meets the requirement with strong, relevant evidence |
| 5 | Excellent — fully meets and exceeds, comprehensive evidence, added value |
Two things follow, and they decide competitions.
"Acceptable" is not a pass, it is a loss. A 3 out of 5 is 60% of the marks for that question. Across a 50% quality weighting, a bid full of 3s scores 30 out of 50. A competitor averaging 4 scores 40. Ten points is usually more than a plausible price difference can recover.
The wording tells you exactly how to move up. Nearly every matrix ties higher scores to evidence and added value. So an answer that describes what you will do earns a 3. The same answer with a named example, a measurable outcome from a comparable contract, and something offered beyond the requirement earns a 4 or 5. The gap between an acceptable answer and a good one is usually two sentences of proof.
What evaluators actually do
An evaluation panel typically scores independently, then meets to moderate and agree a consensus score with a written justification for each question. That justification is the basis of the feedback you later receive.
Some consequences worth designing around:
- They score what is written, not what they know. An evaluator who has worked with you for years cannot award marks for a strength you did not put on the page. Write as if the reader has never heard of you.
- They work through a checklist. If a question asks four things, structure your answer in four labelled parts. Burying the fourth in a paragraph makes it easy to miss and easy to mark down.
- They stop at the word limit. Anything past it is often not read at all, and some portals truncate automatically.
- They are reading many bids in a row. Clear headings, short paragraphs and specifics beat elegant prose. Make it easy to find the thing that earns the mark.
How price is scored
Price is rarely scored proportionally in the way people assume. Common models:
- Lowest price gets full marks, and others get a proportion: your score = (lowest price ÷ your price) × available marks.
- Percentage difference from lowest, with marks deducted per percentage point above it.
- Deviation from the mean, which penalises both very high and suspiciously low bids.
The model is published. It is worth calculating what a 10% price difference actually costs you in points before you decide whether to sharpen your pricing or strengthen your quality answers — the arithmetic often surprises people in both directions.
Be careful with abnormally low tenders. A buyer can ask you to justify a price that looks unsustainable and can reject a bid where the explanation is not satisfactory. Buying the contract at a loss is not a strategy the rules protect.
Social value is scored too
Under current central government policy, social value must carry a minimum weighting of 10% of the total score, applied to procurements started under the Procurement Act from 1 October 2025. The only permitted exception is where market engagement shows the market is not mature enough to deliver it.
Ten percent is frequently the margin of victory, and it is the section most often answered with generic commitments. Specific, local, measurable and deliverable beats ambitious and vague every time — particularly for smaller suppliers, who can genuinely name the apprenticeship, the local subcontractor and the person who will do it.
After the decision
When the buyer publishes the contract award notice, it must give each bidder an assessment summary covering its assessment of that supplier's final tender and of the winning tender, and there is a mandatory eight working day standstill before the contract can be signed.
Read it against your own predicted scores. The pattern across three or four bids is more useful than any single debrief: most companies find they are consistently losing marks in one place, and it is nearly always fixable.
Choosing competitions you can win on the numbers
TendersHub tracks 10,500+ live UK tenders with value, closing date and buyer visible up front, so you can do the arithmetic before you commit a week to a bid — and put that week into the competition where your scores would actually land you first.