A new construction firm posted on UK Business Forums asking how to get past leaflet drops and the odd job. One reply said get CHAS registered, then Constructionline. Another said both would be a waste of time and money until the firm had a few years of trading behind it. That argument sits underneath a bigger question every new contractor asks: the company is months old, there are no accreditations on the wall and no completed contracts to point at, so is there any point bidding for public work yet? A Quora thread asks the blunter version, of the US federal system as it happens: how can a company win a government contract with no past performance? The UK has a better answer than most new bidders expect.
That answer is yes, new companies win public sector work every year, and in our experience almost none of them win it the way the question imagines, by taking a large advertised contract off an established rival. The first win nearly always comes through a side door. Knowing where the doors are is worth more than any amount of bid-writing polish.
Where a first win actually comes from
A first-year firm’s opening public sector win is usually one of three things:
- a subcontract to a main contractor who already holds the work, which builds
delivery history without you passing a selection stage at all;
- a small below-threshold contract from a council or housing association, where
section 85 of the Act stops the buyer screening tenders on your suitability at all, so there is no selection stage to fail (the exception is works contracts estimated at £135,018 or more for central government, £207,720 or more for everyone else, figures current from 1 January 2026);
- a place on a framework or dynamic market with lots sized for smaller
suppliers, which gets you into the room for call-offs without a full open competition each time.
Prime contracts on advertised, above-threshold procurements come later, once one or two of those have given you something real to put in the experience boxes. That is sequencing, not defeatism. Our guide to choosing the right tender opportunities covers how to spend your limited bidding hours on the ones you can actually win.
The law is more on your side than you think
For procurements started on or after 24 February 2025, the Procurement Act 2023 puts written limits on what a buyer can demand at the selection stage. Conditions of participation, the tests you must satisfy to be awarded the contract, may only be set where the buyer is satisfied they are a proportionate means of ensuring that suppliers have the legal and financial capacity, or the technical ability, to perform the contract (section 22(1), checked 20 August 2026). And when the buyer judges proportionality it must have regard to the nature, complexity and cost of the contract (section 22(5)). A £90,000 grounds maintenance contract should not carry the entry tests of a £9m one, and the Act hands you the argument when it does.
Section 22(3) then adds two restrictions on conditions about legal and financial capacity, written with firms like yours in mind (checked 27 August 2026):
- A buyer may not require the submission of audited annual accounts, except
from suppliers who are, or were, required to have the accounts audited in accordance with Part 16 of the Companies Act 2006 or an overseas equivalent. Most new small companies are not: a company is exempt from audit under section 477 if it qualifies as small, which means meeting two of turnover not more than £15 million, balance sheet total not more than £7.5 million, and not more than 50 employees (thresholds raised for financial years beginning on or after 6 April 2025). Whatever management accounts or forecasts you have are what the buyer works with; a demand for three years of audited figures from a one-year-old micro business is a demand the Act does not permit.
- A buyer may not require insurance relating to performance of the contract to
be in place before award. You do not need to carry £5m of cover to bid. You need to show the cover will exist if you win, and a letter from an insurer confirming they would offer it does that job.
You will still meet selection questionnaires that ask for three years of accounts out of habit. On a Procurement Act procurement, a polite clarification question pointing at section 22 is worth asking, and in our experience often gets the requirement read down. Check which regime the procurement runs under first, though: call-offs from older frameworks still sit under the saved 2015 rules, and devolved Scottish buyers under their own 2015 regulations. Our post on the financial checks buyers run walks through the regimes and what to do when you fail a test.
Filling boxes you cannot fill alone
The Act writes the workarounds into statute too. Under section 22(8) you satisfy a condition of participation to the extent that an associated supplier satisfies it, and section 22(9) counts as associated a firm you bid alongside, a firm you will subcontract to, and a firm guaranteeing your performance (checked 27 August 2026). For the subcontract and guarantee routes the buyer has to be satisfied you will enter into legally binding arrangements to that effect, so a name on a form is not enough, and under section 72 the buyer can direct you to sign with the subcontractor you named. In practice:
- a consortium bid with an established partner counts their capacity as yours;
- a parent company guarantee, where there is a parent, answers the financial
standing question;
- naming an experienced subcontractor for the parts of the job you have not
delivered before answers part of the technical one.
On references, read what the buyer has actually asked for. The Procurement Act does not prescribe a selection questionnaire at all, so the form varies by buyer. Where the old standard questionnaire still applies, on procurements that began before 24 February 2025 and on call-offs from frameworks set up under the old rules, it asks for up to three contracts, from the past three years for services and five for works, in any combination of public sector, private sector or VCSE, with a named contact and email address for each. Know the limit of this, though. Under the Act a buyer may require public sector experience. What it may not do is require that a particular authority awarded you a contract (section 22(4)(a)). If public sector experience is a condition and you have none, the associated supplier route above is your way in, not a clarification question. Where the company has no history at all, the people do, and this is the part most first-time bidders undersell. A new company can win, but only if it can draw on experience and knowledge from somewhere, and for a small business that somewhere is almost always the people in it. The most common case we see is the straightforward one: someone has done the job for years inside another organisation, has left to do it on their own, and wants to bring that experience with them. They can. The contracts your directors and key staff delivered for previous employers are evidence of technical ability, and putting named CVs against the delivery plan is the standard way a start-up answers an experience question it cannot answer as a company.
The other two patterns are worth naming because they change the answer entirely. A new venture set up by a founder who ran the same work elsewhere is a new company on paper only. So is a special purpose vehicle, incorporated to bid for one particular contract or programme, with no trading history by design but funded and backed by an entity that has plenty. Neither is a company with no track record in any sense a buyer cares about, and neither should be presented as one.
Register once before you bid anything
Suppliers now register once on the government’s Central Digital Platform and enter their core supplier information there, which is then reused across bids rather than retyped for each one. If you were registered on the old Find a Tender service before the Act commenced, you still need to register again on the platform. Do it before you find your first target, not the week the bid is due; it is free, and it is where buyers will expect to find you.
The construction question: badges before or after the first win?
On that forum thread the advice split exactly where it always does: one reply said get CHAS registered and then Constructionline, another said both would be a waste of time and money until the firm had a few years of trading behind it. We have written a whole post on whether those are worth paying for, and the short version for a new firm is that one badge bought for the specific buyer or framework you are chasing beats three bought for the logo strip. Find the buyer first, read what their selection stage actually scores, then buy the membership that moves that score. Buying badges before you know who you are selling to is the most common way new contractors spend their first bidding budget on nothing.
Should a first-year firm bid at all?
Our view: yes, selectively, and sooner than feels comfortable, because the capability you need is built by bidding rather than before it.
The year-one bids that pay are small ones: below-threshold council work, subcontract packages, framework entry rounds aimed at SMEs. Each one forces you to assemble the pack every later bid reuses, your policies, your insurance position, your CVs, your first case studies written up properly. Lose a small bid and the feedback costs you little. Win one and you have the reference that unlocks the next size up.
What we would not do in year one is chase large advertised contracts to “get the name out”. Buyers do not remember losing bidders fondly, and every hour on an unwinnable bid is an hour not spent delivering the small job that becomes your first public sector reference. Bid where the selection stage is passable with the evidence you genuinely have, and build from there. Our bid writing team, APMP-certified writers among them, spends a lot of its time doing exactly this arithmetic with new firms: working out which doors are open now, and which ones need one more win first.