Bid / no-bid· Explainer
Bid or No Bid? Answer the Knockout Questions First
A bid/no-bid decision is only as good as the facts underneath it. Before weighing fit, value and strategy, find out whether anything in the tender can stop you outright.
Most bid/no-bid processes end in a scorecard.
Strategic fit: 8. Relationship with the buyer: 6. Margin: 7. Capacity: 5. Somebody adds it up, the total clears a threshold, and the bid goes ahead.
The trouble is that a scorecard averages. A tender can score well on every line and still be unwinnable, because one condition three schedules away means the tender will never be scored at all. Seven out of ten for strategic fit does not compensate for a zero that nobody has found yet.
Government guidance frames the decision in one sentence. The Home Office's SME/VCSE Bid Pack puts it like this:
Is this the right opportunity for us, and can we deliver it well?
That is the right question. But it hides an order of work. Before “is this the right opportunity” can be weighed, a narrower set of questions has to be settled: the ones that can stop you outright.
Two kinds of question#
The questions in a bid/no-bid decision are not all the same kind.
| Question | Kind | Where the answer lives |
|---|---|---|
| Can we meet the conditions of participation? | Knockout | Tender notice and documents, against your evidence |
| Is there a pass/fail minimum we cannot clear? | Knockout | Award criteria and assessment methodology |
| Can we submit a compliant tender by the deadline? | Knockout | Procedural requirements, against your capacity |
| Could we live with the contract terms? | Knockout, mostly | The contract and its schedules |
| Does this fit what we are good at? | Weighing | Your own judgement |
| Is it worth the cost of bidding? | Weighing | Your own judgement |
| Can we realistically win? | Weighing | Your judgement, informed by the scoring |
Knockouts are binary and the tender pack decides them. Weighing questions are a matter of judgement and appetite.
The two need handling differently. A weighing question can be scored, debated and balanced against others. A knockout cannot be balanced against anything. If it fails, the rest of the scorecard is decoration.
The knockouts, in order#
1. Can we participate at all?#
Under the Procurement Act 2023, a buyer must disregard any tender from a supplier that does not satisfy the conditions of participation. Not “may”. Must.
So this is the first thing to establish: what the conditions of participation are, and whether you can meet them.
It is also the place where false knockouts are most common. A condition that seems to demand audited accounts or insurance you do not yet hold may, on a careful reading, demand something you can actually provide. The Bid Pack's advice on eligibility is blunt: if your organisation cannot meet the requirements, “it may not be worth pursuing the bid”. The important word is cannot. Find out whether it is cannot or merely looks like cannot.
2. Is there a pass/fail line we cannot clear?#
Some award criteria are not scored on a scale. They set a minimum, and a tender that falls below it is out.
Cabinet Office guidance says the tender documents must make clear which award criteria have minimum requirements and will be scored on a pass/fail basis, leading to a tender being disregarded if they are not met. Specifications can do something similar with mandatory requirements.
These are easy to miss because they often sit inside scoring tables, which bidders tend to read for points rather than for exits. Read them for exits first.
3. Can we comply with the process?#
A buyer may also disregard a tender that breaches a procedural requirement: a missed deadline, an exceeded word count, a missing mandatory attachment.
At bid/no-bid stage the question is not whether you can follow instructions. It is whether you can produce everything the process demands, in the required form, by the deadline. A certificate with a four-week lead time, a reference that has to come from a client who is on holiday, or a portal registration that nobody has started can each turn a capable supplier into a non-compliant one.
4. Could we accept the contract?#
This one is less absolute, which is why the table says “mostly”. Some procedures allow negotiation, but in many public procurements the contract in the pack is largely the contract you would sign, and it is safer to assume so until the documents say otherwise.
Liability, service levels, payment terms, insurance on award, mobilisation dates: if one of them is something your business genuinely cannot carry, that is a knockout, even though no evaluator will ever mark it. The Bid Pack makes the same point in plainer terms: check that the contract is financially workable, including cash flow, start-up costs and payment terms.
“Unknown” is an answer — temporarily#
Working through the knockouts honestly produces three kinds of answer, not two: yes, no, and unknown.
Unknown is common, and it is not a failure of reading. Requirements are spread across documents, phrased ambiguously, or contradicted elsewhere in the pack. Some cannot be settled from the documents at all.
What matters is what happens to an unknown next. It should be resolved in a set order:
- look again, across the whole pack and any clarifications already issued;
- if the pack does not settle it, raise a clarification question before the clarification deadline;
- if the answer will not arrive in time, decide explicitly how much risk you are prepared to carry.
The Home Office's own evaluators, quoted in the same Bid Pack, are clear about which they prefer: “If something in the tender looks off, we'd rather you ask than guess.”
This also gives the decision a date. A bid/no-bid decision taken before the knockouts are settled is provisional, and it is worth saying so. A sensible rule is that the final decision cannot come before the last unknown has either been resolved or deliberately accepted.
Then weigh it#
Once nothing can stop you outright, the familiar questions finally carry meaning. The Bid Pack's list is a reasonable one: fit with your strengths, the time and people needed to bid and deliver, whether the contract is financially workable, red flags and risks, strategic value, and whether to work with others.
This is the part a scorecard is good at. It is also the part where judgement legitimately differs between businesses. A contract one company should decline may be exactly right for another.
Declining is a legitimate outcome of a good process, not a sign of a weak one. As the Bid Pack puts it: “Saying ‘no’ to a bad-fit bid is a sign of maturity, not failure.”
Write down why#
The Bid Pack recommends keeping a short record of why you decided to bid or not. It is worth making that record slightly more specific than a score.
For each knockout, note the answer and where it came from. For each unknown, note how it was resolved, or that it was accepted as a risk. Then note the weighing.
That record earns its keep twice. During the bid, if a clarification changes a requirement, you can see at once whether the decision rested on it. After the bid, win or lose, it shows whether the decision failed because of the facts or because of the judgement. Those need different fixes next time.
A bid/no-bid decision does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be made in the right order: facts first, judgement second, and nothing averaged that should have been checked.