The selection stage is the least interesting part of a tender and the most brutal. It is not asking whether you would do a good job. It is asking whether you are financially sound enough, insured enough, experienced enough and clean enough to be allowed into the competition at all.
Most of it is pass or fail. Which means a company that would have delivered the contract beautifully can go out on an insurance certificate that expired last month.
Under the Procurement Act 2023 this stage is formally about conditions of participation, and the old standard selection questionnaire has been partly absorbed into the supplier information you hold on the central digital platform. In practice you still fill in a questionnaire, because buyers still add their own contract-specific conditions on top. The content has barely changed.
The four things being tested
1. Exclusion grounds
A set of declarations about your organisation and its connected people: convictions for specified offences, tax offences, professional misconduct, competition law breaches, insolvency, serious breaches of previous public contracts, and whether anyone associated with the business is on the debarment list.
Mandatory grounds exclude you outright. Discretionary grounds allow the buyer to exclude you, and allow you to explain — the self-cleaning provisions let you set out what happened, what you changed and why it will not happen again. A discretionary ground declared with a clear, specific explanation is survivable. The same ground discovered later, undeclared, is not.
Answer these honestly and completely. They are checkable, and a false declaration is far worse than the thing being declared.
2. Financial standing
Usually the last two years of accounts, sometimes a credit rating check, sometimes a minimum annual turnover.
Under the Act a buyer's conditions of participation must be proportionate to the contract, which makes the old habit of demanding three times the contract value in turnover harder to justify. It has not disappeared. If a threshold looks disproportionate, you can ask the buyer to justify it through the clarification process before the deadline — occasionally they adjust it.
If you are a young company without two years of accounts, say so and offer what you have: management accounts, a parent company guarantee, a bank reference, forecasts. Some buyers accept alternatives; none of them can accept a blank.
3. Insurance
Employer's liability, public liability, professional indemnity, sometimes product liability or specific cover for the contract type. The required levels are stated in the documents.
Two practical points. You do not usually need the cover in place at bid stage — a written undertaking from your broker that you will hold it if awarded is normally accepted. And check the expiry dates on the certificates you are attaching. An expired certificate is one of the most common avoidable failures at this stage.
4. Technical and professional ability
Contract examples, usually two or three, of similar scope, similar value, in the last three to five years. Sometimes relevant accreditations — ISO 9001, ISO 14001, Cyber Essentials, CHAS or SafeContractor, sector licences.
This is where genuine judgement is needed, and where a lot of bids quietly die.
How to write a contract example that scores
The examples are marked against relevance, not impressiveness. A modest contract that closely matches the one being tendered beats an enormous contract that does not.
A good example states, in this order:
- The client and what they were. A district council, an NHS trust, a multi-academy trust. If the client type matches the buyer, say so plainly.
- The value and the duration. Real figures. Vagueness reads as an attempt to hide a small number.
- The scope, mapped to their specification. If they want planned and reactive maintenance across twenty sites, describe planned and reactive maintenance across however many sites you did, in their words.
- What actually happened. Measurable outcomes: uptime, response times, savings, satisfaction scores, KPI performance, on-time completion.
- A contactable referee, who knows you are naming them.
The most common mistake is describing the company rather than the contract. "We have twenty years of experience in facilities management" is not a contract example. It is a sentence that scores nothing.
Practical rules that save bids
Read the whole document set before writing anything. The selection requirements, the specification and the pricing schedule have to be consistent with each other. People discover on the last afternoon that the insurance requirement is unmeetable.
Build a bid library. Accounts, insurance certificates, all policies, accreditation certificates, your standard company description, and three or four contract examples kept current. Most of the selection stage becomes assembly rather than writing, and the second bid takes half the time of the first.
Keep policies alive. Health and safety, equality and diversity, environmental, quality, data protection, modern slavery, safeguarding if you work with vulnerable people. They must be signed, dated within a sensible period, and actually about your business. A downloaded template with another company name still in it is noticed.
Use the clarification window. Every competition has one, and every question and answer is published to all bidders. If a requirement is ambiguous or looks disproportionate, ask early — late clarifications often go unanswered before the deadline.
Submit early. Portals close on the second and most let you amend a submission right up to close. There is nothing to gain from submitting in the last hour and a contract to lose.
If you fail at selection
Ask why. Under the Procurement Act buyers must give suppliers proper feedback on assessment, and a selection-stage failure is nearly always a single specific thing: a turnover threshold, a missing accreditation, an example judged not comparable.
That is useful information. It is either fixable before the next bid, or it tells you that this buyer's contracts are out of reach for now and your time belongs on smaller ones — where the reference that fixes the problem comes from.
Finding contracts you can actually pass the selection stage on
TendersHub tracks 10,500+ live UK tenders and lets you filter by contract value and closing date before you open a single document — so you can rule out the ones whose financial and experience requirements you cannot yet meet, and spend the week on the ones you can.