How public tendering actually works

Find the notice

Contracts are advertised on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland. All three are free to search. The problem is volume and language: a search for "electrical" returns a £50m national framework, a £40k school rewire and the supply of electricity to a leisure centre, formatted identically.

That is the job Callout does — it reads all three hourly, keeps the work a firm your size could actually staff, and scores each one. Browse what is open now.

Decide whether to bid at all

This is where most time gets wasted, because it is the stage people skip. Read the notice and answer four questions honestly: can you resource it, do you hold what it asks for, is it inside your patch, and is the value worth the effort of bidding? A contract split into lots is usually a better bet than one that is not, because you can bid for one area rather than all of them.

Deciding not to bid is a result. Two good bids beat six rushed ones.

Register

Two registrations, and both are reusable. The government's central digital platform holds your company details once and shares them across Find a Tender, so you do not retype them for every bid. Then each buyer runs its own e-tendering portal — Proactis, In-Tend, Jaggaer, Delta and so on — and you register on whichever the notice names. Bids are submitted there, never by email.

Selection — do you qualify?

Before anyone looks at your price, the buyer checks you are a safe pair of hands. Expect to be asked for insurance certificates, two or three years of accounts, health and safety policy, references for similar work, and often an accreditation — SSIP, CHAS, SafeContractor, SMAS or Constructionline Gold, which meets the Common Assessment Standard.

This is the stage that stops most first-timers, and it is entirely fixable — but not in the three weeks a tender is open. It is the argument for watching contracts that are coming up for renewal, because that gives you months rather than weeks to get accredited before the work is advertised.

The tender itself

Two halves. Price — usually a schedule of rates or a priced bill, and the cheapest bid does not automatically win. Quality — written answers about how you would run the job: resourcing, supervision, response times, what happens when something goes wrong, social value.

The notice tells you the weighting, often something like 60% price and 40% quality. Answer the question that is asked, use their words, and give examples from jobs you have actually done. Every answer you write becomes a reusable draft for the next one.

Submit

Deadlines are absolute. A bid uploaded a minute late is not accepted, and nobody has discretion to accept it. Portals get slow in the final hour because everybody else left it late too — upload a day early, then refine if you have time.

Evaluation and the result

A panel scores every bid against the published criteria. When they decide, they publish a contract award notice and send unsuccessful bidders an assessment summary — your scores, with reasons, and how the winner scored. There is then a short standstill period before the contract is signed, so a bidder who thinks the process went wrong can say so.

Read the assessment summary even when you lose, especially when you lose. It is a free, written explanation of exactly where you dropped marks, and the next bid to that buyer is much easier because of it.

Mobilisation

Contract signed, then a start date — often weeks out, sometimes with TUPE if staff transfer from the outgoing contractor. If the notice mentioned TUPE, factor it into your price before you bid, not after.