Construction and building services· Explainer
What’s Different About a Construction Tender Pack?
A construction tender pack has the usual skeleton, plus three things most other packs don't: the design, a works contract whose options decide the risk you are pricing, and pricing documents built around it.
Most of a construction tender pack will look familiar: instructions to tenderers, quality questions, an evaluation methodology, a clarification log. The general guide to what's in a tender pack applies.
But construction adds documents that other sectors rarely have, and they change where the risk sits. This is true whether you are a main contractor pricing a new building, or a specialist pricing the electrical, fire alarm or security installation within one.
Prequalification usually comes through the Common Assessment Standard#
For public works, the selection stage often looks different. Instead of answering a long questionnaire from scratch for each tender, suppliers are commonly asked for the Common Assessment Standard, Build UK's industry standard for construction pre-qualification.
The government's own guidance points this way. The Procurement Specific Questionnaire template says that “public contracts for works should continue to use the questions set out in the Common Assessment Standard”, and Build UK's overview for public sector clients quotes policy guidance telling authorities to use it “in place of the standard SQ template” for works contracts.
The practical points, from that same overview:
- Certification comes from an audit by one of the Recognised Assessment Bodies, at one of two levels: desktop or site-based.
- A supplier holding certification is “deemed to meet the requirements for stage 1 pre-qualification”. The buyer can then focus on project-specific questions, including financial stability and insurance.
- Certification is valid for a year, provided any “time-critical” documents are updated when they expire.
That last point is the one that catches people out. An expired insurance certificate or lapsed accreditation inside your assessment can quietly undermine a certificate you thought was current. The financial and insurance questions that remain are also worth reading carefully, because they are specific to the project.
If you are not certified, the overview says a buyer can ask you to answer the relevant questions directly instead. Either way, the core supplier information described in the PSQ still applies.
The design is where scope hides#
A construction pack usually includes the design, or as much of it as exists: drawings, written specifications, schedules and reports.
It also includes pre-construction information. Under the CDM Regulations, a client must provide pre-construction information “as soon as is practicable to every designer and contractor appointed, or being considered for appointment”. In other words, to you as a bidder. It typically covers the site and existing structure: hazards such as asbestos, access and working-hours restrictions, services, and anything else that affects how the work can be done safely.
These documents are rich in requirements that never appear in a quality question:
- a note on a drawing that adds a specification standard;
- a specification clause that requires a particular product “or equivalent”;
- a working-hours restriction in the pre-construction information that changes your programme and your labour costs;
- a survey that shows something the drawings don't.
The documents are also produced by different people at different times, so the drawing, the specification and the pricing document do not always agree. That is a standard contradiction, and in construction it usually has a price attached.
The contract option decides the risk you are pricing#
Public construction work is commonly let on standard forms such as NEC or JCT, sometimes with amendments. The form matters less than the choices made within it.
NEC4's Engineering and Construction Contract is a clear example. It has six main options, which NEC describes as covering “the full range of financial risk allocation”, from the contractor carrying most of it to the client carrying most of it.
| NEC4 ECC option | In short |
|---|---|
| A — Priced contract with activity schedule | You are paid the prices for completed activities |
| B — Priced contract with bill of quantities | You are paid rates against measured quantities |
| C — Target contract with activity schedule | Cost is paid against a target, and over- or under-spend is shared |
| D — Target contract with bill of quantities | As C, with the target built from a bill of quantities |
| E — Cost reimbursable contract | You are paid defined cost plus a fee |
| F — Management contract | You manage the work and subcontract most of it |
The same specification priced under Option A and Option E is a very different commercial proposition.
Then there are the secondary options and amendments, which is where many of the commercially significant terms sit: delay damages, retention, performance bonds, parent company guarantees, limits of liability. In NEC contracts they appear as secondary options in the contract data. Bespoke amendments appear as additional conditions, usually called Z clauses. JCT contracts set many of the same items in the contract particulars.
Read these before you price, not after you win. A retention percentage affects your cash flow. A bond requirement may need arranging with a surety. A bespoke amendment can quietly move a risk the standard form would have left with the client. If one of them is something your business cannot carry, it is a knockout, whatever the quality score.
Pricing documents follow the contract#
The pricing document in a construction pack is usually shaped by the contract: a bill of quantities to be rated, or an activity schedule to be priced, alongside forms for preliminaries, provisional sums and daywork.
Two habits help:
- Price what the documents say, and note where they disagree. If the bill measures something the specification doesn't describe, or the reverse, that is a question for the clarification period, not an assumption to bury in a rate.
- Know who carries the quantity risk. Under a priced option with a bill of quantities, quantities are remeasured. Under an activity schedule, you have generally priced the activity, whatever the quantities turn out to be.
Specialist trades: certification is often a condition#
For electrical, fire, security and other specialist building services, tenders often ask for third-party certification: schemes such as NICEIC or NAPIT for electrical work, and BAFE or NSI for fire and security systems.
Before deciding whether you qualify, check four things:
- Is it a condition of participation or a contract requirement? One decides whether you can bid. The other decides what you must hold to do the work.
- Who must hold it? You, or whoever actually carries out that part of the work, which could be a subcontractor.
- By when? At submission, at award or at mobilisation.
- Are equivalents accepted? Under the Procurement Act, a condition of participation cannot require particular qualifications without allowing for their equivalents. A requirement that names one scheme and nothing else is worth a clarification question.
The same discipline, more documents#
None of this changes the basic method: work out what each document is for, find anything that could stop you, then read across the documents for what they say together.
Construction simply has more documents, written by more people, with more money attached to the gaps between them. That makes the discipline more valuable, not less.