PQQ / Selection Questionnaire (SQ): How to Pass It

A Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) or Selection Questionnaire (SQ) is the part of a tender that qualifies your firm to be considered, before anyone evaluates your proposal. It gathers standing information about the SUPPLIER - who you are, your financial position, your insurances, your relevant experience, your health-and-safety and compliance arrangements - and confirms none of the exclusion grounds apply to you. It is the buyer asking, in effect, "is this a firm we could safely and lawfully contract with?" before spending time reading its answers to the actual requirement.

Crucially, this stage is normally pass/fail. You either meet each requirement or you do not; there are no comparative marks and no ranking against other bidders. A firm with a spotless questionnaire has no advantage over a firm that merely met the same requirements - both simply pass through to the scored stage. That is why polishing the prose here is wasted effort: the questionnaire rewards being correct and complete, not being impressive.

In an open, single-stage procedure the questionnaire sits inside one submission alongside your tender, but the two are still assessed separately - the selection questions checked pass/fail first, the award questions scored afterwards. In a two-stage (multi-stage) procedure, the questionnaire is a genuine first round: only firms that pass are invited to submit a full tender at all.

The terminology has shifted, and both sets of words are alive in the wild. Under the Procurement Act 2023 - which went live on 24 February 2025 - this stage is called conditions of participation, set out in section 22. Buyers set proportionate conditions about your legal and financial standing, technical ability, and relevant experience and capability, and test them through a standard supplier information / selection questionnaire. The Act deliberately moved away from the old label.

The legacy Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR 2015) - which still governs procurements that commenced before 24 February 2025 - used the terms PQQ and SQ, and the standard Selection Questionnaire (the Cabinet Office PPN 8/16 SQ) that went with them. Because that vocabulary is decades old and embedded in buyers' templates and portals, a great many contracting authorities still say "PQQ" or "complete the SQ" even on Procurement Act procurements. Treat the words as interchangeable in practice: whatever it is called, it is the same gate.

One thing to hold clearly: whichever regime a tender runs under, the selection stage is about your firm and is pass/fail. Do not read the change of name as a change of purpose - the questionnaire still qualifies the supplier, not the bid.

The single most useful distinction in the whole tender is the one between this stage and the next. Conditions of participation (section 22) are about your FIRM and are pass/fail - can you hold this contract? Award criteria (section 23) are about your TENDER and are comparative - whose proposal is best? They answer different questions and are assessed in different ways, and the Act keeps them separate for a reason.

This matters to you in a concrete way: the same thing cannot lawfully be both a gate and a scored criterion. A buyer should not require, say, three years of relevant experience as a pass/fail condition of participation and then also award marks for that same experience at the award stage - that double-counts your standing and disadvantages newer or smaller firms. If you spot a tender that appears to score you again on something already tested pass/fail at selection, that is a fair clarification question, and sometimes a challengeable flaw.

Practically, read every tender with the split in mind. Find the selection questions, clear them cleanly, and then spend your real writing effort at the award stage where the marks actually are. Our guide on eligibility and qualification to bid covers the conditions-and-exclusions side in more depth; our guide on how tenders are scored covers what wins the comparative marks.

Small firms rarely fail the selection stage on merit - they fail on avoidable, mechanical mistakes. These are the ones that recur, and every one is preventable if you check the questionnaire early rather than the night before the deadline:

• ·Insurance levels: the tender states minimum cover - public liability, employers' liability, professional indemnity - and firms either hold too little or cannot evidence it. You generally do not need the full policy in place to bid, only by the time the contract starts, so a signed undertaking to obtain the stated cover if awarded usually suffices - but you must say so explicitly, not leave it blank.
• ·Turnover / financial thresholds: a minimum annual turnover requirement trips firms that miss the line or misread it. Under the Procurement Act 2023 such a condition must be a proportionate means of checking you can perform the contract (section 22), judged against its nature, complexity and cost - there is no fixed statutory ceiling. As a rule of thumb, buyers still rarely set the bar much above twice the contract value (the old PCR 2015 benchmark many carry over), so where a modest contract demands a very large turnover it may well be disproportionate and worth a clarification - though a buyer can justify a higher figure on genuinely high-risk work.
• ·Reference contracts: most questionnaires ask for a set number of comparable contracts (often two or three) of similar scope, value and recency. Firms lose here by offering references that are too small, too old, or plainly unlike the work - or by naming a referee they never warned. Line up relevant, recent, willing references in advance.
• ·Financial standing evidence: buyers cannot demand audited accounts from a firm not legally required to prepare them, so do not be scared off by that wording - offer the accounts or assurance you are actually obliged to hold. A weak balance sheet can often be met with a parent-company guarantee or other proportionate assurance instead.
• ·Missing or half-answered questions: on a pass/fail stage a blank is a fail. Unanswered health-and-safety, compliance or policy questions (equalities, modern slavery, environmental policy on larger contracts) sink otherwise strong firms. Answer every field, and never leave a mandatory question empty on the assumption it will be overlooked.
• ·Honest declarations: the self-declaration on exclusion grounds must be answered truthfully. A disclosed and explained historic issue - with what you have put right - is treated far better than one concealed and later discovered. A false declaration is more damaging than the thing it conceals.

Almost everything a selection questionnaire asks is stable from bid to bid: your company details and registration numbers, insurance certificates and levels, financial figures, standard policies, and a library of reference contracts. Firms that treat every questionnaire as a fresh assembly job waste days and make errors under deadline pressure. Firms that maintain an answer bank clear the gate in an afternoon.

Build it once and keep it current. Hold, in one place: your legal and registration details; current insurance certificates with cover levels and renewal dates; your latest accounts or financial assurance; up-to-date policies (health and safety, equalities, environmental, modern slavery, data protection, quality); and a maintained set of reference contracts, each with client, value, dates, scope and a warned, willing contact. Diary the renewal and expiry dates so nothing lapses mid-tender.

Then, on each new questionnaire, you are checking and tailoring rather than starting cold - confirming the insurance levels meet this contract's minimums, picking the two or three references closest to this scope, and updating any figure that has moved. The discipline is not clever writing; it is a live, dated, trustworthy set of firm-level evidence you can drop into any tender at short notice. This is exactly the kind of standing evidence BidSquirrel helps you keep in one place and match against each tender's stated conditions, so the gate stops being a scramble.