There isn’t really a competitive tender market in UK public service consultancy anymore.
How can we get back to an open competitive market when this ‘creep’ of reduced competition seems to have won?
There isn’t really a competitive tender market in UK public service consultancy anymore. RedQuadrant is set up to compete in a fair fight for a wide range of public sector tenders. We get an enormous volume of tender emails, and we’re signed up to over 365 different tender portals.
In 2009, when we started, many tenders were advertised and were actually competitive. If you put together a fantastic team and a fantastic plan that showed real understanding of the client situation and great insights into how to tackle it — at a good price — you had a good chance of being invited to pitch, meet the clients, and potentially win.
Of course, a lot of work was won in other ways:
- sell-on from existing projects, legally extending contracts (about a third of our work comes this way)
- people going to consultancies they know and trust for small pieces of work, calling on very specialist or unique services, or inviting a small selection of companies to bid (about a third of our work comes by this route)
- consultancies hiring trusted senior people, who maintain or build relationships
- marketing like sponsoring awards ceremonies, paid content in the public sector press and so on
These days, the number of competitive tenders coming out is tiny. And even where a tender appears to be competitive, about half of them are ‘suspicious’ — there’s a popular incumbent, the tender wording matches a company’s website description of its services, etc. And being ‘invited to pitch’ is incredibly rare — most awards are just based on scoring bids.
Even on the frameworks — set up for smaller competition between pre-selected businesses — about 85% of awards are direct and non-competive, where the buyer just selects a firm. It’s easy to get onto the general frameworks, to facilitate direct awards, from which the framework setup organisation gets a percentage. Some businesses have co-opted some small part of the UK public service institutional clutter to create a ‘single provider framework’ so they can sell without the legal need for competition. And the big frameworks are limited to the big firms so the big government departments can get the people they want.
We even spoke to a business who claimed that — for a fee — they could get anyone on to the big frameworks and connect them to big buyers 18 months in advance of the work coming out, to build relationships and win the work.
___
Why should you care? Shouldn’t consultancies get out there, make friends, shape the tenders and ensure they get the work long before it gets to tender?
Without open competitive tendering, you get supplier lock-in and control, higher prices through marketing, and increased potential for corruption.
True competition open to scrutiny comes through tenders put out completely openly or through established frameworks, with requirements, evaluation standards, and possibly budget.
How can we get back to an open competitive market when this ‘creep’ of reduced competition seems to have won?
