Public vs Private Sector Tendering: What Changes

A private buyer can run its purchasing however it likes. It can invite one supplier, three, or fifty. It can change its mind, move the goalposts, award to the firm the director trusts, and never tell the losers why. There is no statutory transparency, no standstill, no right to feedback and no procurement-specific route to challenge the decision. Contract law and the buyer's own policies are the only real constraints. That is not sharp practice - it is simply what an unregulated market looks like.

A public buyer above the relevant threshold is doing something legally quite different. The Procurement Act 2023 requires the buyer to run a defined, published process, to treat suppliers equally and without discrimination, and to be able to defend the outcome if a disappointed bidder asks hard questions. The award criteria and their weightings are set out before bids come in. The buyer must score your submission against those criteria and, in practice, be able to show its working.

The practical upshot for you: in private tendering, effort spent building the relationship and reading the buyer's real priorities pays off directly. In public tendering, that same effort matters far earlier - during market engagement, before the tender is published - because once the process is live, the buyer's hands are largely tied to the scoresheet.

Under PA23 there are two main routes a buyer can use for a competitive award. The open procedure is a single stage: the opportunity is advertised, anyone can submit a full bid, and all bids are evaluated together. The competitive flexible procedure is a design-your-own multi-stage process - the buyer can build in shortlisting rounds, dialogue, site visits or negotiation to suit the contract. It replaces the old named procedures (restricted, competitive dialogue and the rest) that you will still see on older or Scottish tenders.

There is also direct award, but it is narrow and policed. A buyer can only skip competition on a specific ground in the Act (a Schedule 5 justification, or the limited grounds in sections 41 to 43) and must usually publish a transparency notice before or around the award. Self-inflicted urgency - the buyer left it too late - does not count. If you see a lot of direct awards in your sector, that is intelligence about how a market really behaves, not a door you can rely on.

Two things the buyer decides are worth understanding because they shape your bid:

• ·Conditions of participation (section 22) are pass/fail hurdles about your firm - insurance levels, financial standing, relevant experience, required certifications. Miss one and you are out before quality is even read.
• ·Award criteria (section 23) are the comparative scoring of your actual bid - quality, price, social value and so on, each with a published weighting. The same factor cannot lawfully be scored in both places, so read carefully where each requirement sits.

This is where public and private diverge most sharply, and where a public tender is worth the paperwork even when you lose. When a public buyer decides who has won, it must normally hold a standstill period - 8 working days under PA23 - before signing the contract. During that window it provides an assessment summary telling each bidder how their bid scored and how that compared with the winner against the criteria.

That is a genuine, structured debrief you are entitled to. It tells you exactly where you dropped marks, which questions you under-answered, and how far off the winning score you were. Use it. Over two or three bids it becomes a map of what a given buyer actually rewards, and your win rate climbs accordingly. Private buyers owe you none of this; a polite 'we've gone another way' is often all you will ever get.

The standstill also carries a right to challenge. If you believe the buyer broke the rules - undisclosed criteria, a manifest scoring error, a conflict of interest - there is a formal route to contest it, and issuing proceedings within the standstill can keep the contract unsigned while the matter is looked at. The clock is short and unforgiving (broadly around 30 days from when you knew or should have known of the problem), so this is a decision to take quickly and, for anything serious, with proper legal advice. Most SMEs never litigate, and shouldn't lightly, but the mere existence of the right disciplines how buyers behave.

In private tendering, an established relationship is a legitimate reason to win. The buyer trusts you, you have delivered before, switching is a hassle, so you get the nod - and often you get to see the competing quote and sharpen yours. Incumbency is a real, defensible advantage.

In public tendering, the relationship cannot be the deciding factor. The buyer must evaluate on the published criteria, and 'we've always used them' is not one. That is precisely what makes public work winnable for a newcomer: the incumbent has to re-win on the scoresheet like everyone else. Incumbency still helps - they know the service, they can evidence delivery, they may have quietly shaped the specification during market engagement - but it is an advantage that has to be converted into scored answers, not simply assumed.

The lesson for adapting your approach: in the private world, invest in the buyer relationship right up to signature. In the public world, invest in the relationship early and legitimately - responding to pre-market engagement, prior information notices and buyer 'meet the market' events - then, once the tender drops, go quiet and let the written bid do the work. Lobbying an evaluator mid-process can get you disqualified.

Private buyers can let price decide, and frequently do, because nothing forces them to weigh anything else. They can also move fast - a decision in a fortnight, a contract on a handshake and a purchase order. The looseness cuts both ways: quick to win, quick to lose, and easily undercut by a rival the buyer likes better next quarter.

Public buyers award on the balance of criteria they published, which by design is rarely price alone. Quality, social value and delivery approach carry real weight, and for in-scope central government work social value must count for a minimum share of the score. That is good news for a capable SME that would lose a pure price race to a large low-cost operator. The trade-off is speed: a public procurement can run for months from advert to award, with rigid deadlines, portal registration and a fixed question-and-answer window where you must raise every query in writing before the clock runs out.

So the tempo of your business development has to change. Private pipeline can be worked opportunistically. Public pipeline has to be watched in advance - you want to know an opportunity is coming before it is advertised, because once it is live there is no room to influence it and often only three or four weeks to produce a serious bid.

Private work comes through your network, referrals, and direct outreach. Public work is advertised on official channels, and there are several because the UK does not have one single front door. For GB public tendering (England, Scotland and Wales) the main places to look are the national and portal services below.

The hidden cost here is registration overhead. Where a private buyer just emails you a spec, a public buyer makes you register on their portal, complete a supplier questionnaire and submit through their system. Do it once per portal and it is reusable; the first time on each is an afternoon gone. Factor that into your bid/no-bid maths, especially for a one-off low-value opportunity on a portal you will never use again.

• ·Find a Tender (FTS) - the national service for higher-value opportunities across GB.
• ·Contracts Finder - England, for lower-value and some higher-value contracts.
• ·Public Contracts Scotland - the portal for Scottish public bodies, which run under Scotland's own procurement rules, not PA23.
• ·Sell2Wales - Welsh opportunities, where PA23 applies alongside a Welsh policy overlay.
• ·Buyer e-sourcing portals - ProContract, In-tend, Delta, Jaggaer and Atamis (NHS). Individual councils and trusts run their tenders inside these, and each needs its own supplier registration.

Not always, and it is worth being blunt about that. Public tendering rewards firms that can commit to it repeatedly. The first bid into a new buyer or sector is expensive in hours and usually a learning exercise; the return comes from the second, third and fourth, once you understand what that buyer rewards and can reuse your material. If you can only ever do one public bid, the odds and the overhead rarely justify it.

Public work is worth pursuing when: your quality genuinely beats a lowest-price competitor and the scoresheet lets that show; the contract length or framework place gives you a stable revenue base worth building capability around; there is a visible, repeating pipeline of similar work in your sector and region; and you can absorb long payment and decision timescales without cash-flow strain. It is worth avoiding when the opportunity is a one-off, tiny relative to the bidding effort, wired around an incumbent you cannot displace, or in a sector where you would be scoring near-zero on essential conditions of participation.

The realistic model for most SMEs is not 'public or private' but a deliberate blend: private work for cash flow and speed, public work for stability and scale, with public bidding concentrated on a narrow band of buyers and contract types you can win more than once. Chasing every public notice that lands in your inbox is the fastest way to burn hours for nothing.