Ask any regular bidder what their last three losing letters actually told them and you get the same shrug. You keep coming second or third, every letter says the submission was strong, and nothing in it tells you what to change. “Why are we not winning tenders?” is really two questions: what is actually going wrong, and how do you find out when the buyer’s letter says nothing useful. Most advice on the first question is generalities. The second question has a legal answer, a mechanical answer and a tactical answer, and all three changed when the Procurement Act 2023 came in.
What a buyer now owes you, and when
For procurements started on or after 24 February 2025, the Act replaced the old award decision letter with two separate things. Where the contract was awarded following a competitive tendering procedure, section 50(3) requires the buyer to give every supplier that submitted an assessed tender an assessment summary, before the contract award notice is published. Section 51(2) then gives you a mandatory standstill period of eight working days from the day that notice is published before the contract can be signed (checked 27 August 2026).
Notice what moved. Under the 2015 regulations, the letter that told you the outcome also started the standstill clock. Under the Act, the summary arrives first and the published notice starts the clock, so your deadline runs from a notice you have to go and look for on the central platform, not from anything landing in your inbox. When the summary arrives, find the notice and diarise the eight working days that day. Section 51(3) takes six routes outside the mandatory standstill altogether, among them awards made in accordance with a framework, awards by reference to a dynamic market and light touch contracts, so check which route your bid sat under before you start counting.
Why the letter reads so flat
The blandness that infuriates losing bidders is manufactured, and it helps to know how. The Government Commercial Agency’s guide for evaluators has bids scored individually against the published criteria first, then moderated: a moderator who was not part of the original evaluation team reviews the independent scores, hunts for vague or incomplete justifications and for mismatches between marks and reasons, and works the evaluators towards a single consensus score. Buyers are told to keep records sufficient to give what the guide calls “a full and helpful debrief”, and to retain them for at least three years from contract award (checked 27 August 2026).
Your feedback letter is what survives that process: wording several people agreed they could defend in front of a judge. “Good response, minor weaknesses, insufficient evidence at points” is not an evaluator being lazy. It is the residue of an argument you were not in the room for, and it tells you where marks really go. A claim without evidence cannot be defended in moderation, so its score drifts down to what the words on the page prove. We have taken the evaluators’ guide apart stage by stage in what the people scoring your bid are told to do, and it is worth reading before your next submission rather than after your next loss.
What to do with your eight working days
Treat the assessment summary as evaluation data, because it is the only free evaluation data you will ever get.
- Read it against your submission the day it arrives, criterion by criterion,
and mark every place where the stated reason surprises you.
- Where the summary is thin, put focused questions to the buyer in writing,
inside the standstill window: which elements of the criterion wording cost the marks on this question, and what would a higher-scoring answer have evidenced? Specific questions get specific answers; “can you give us more feedback” gets another paragraph of nothing.
- Ask for a debrief conversation, knowing you are not owed one. We could find
no provision in the Act granting a right to a meeting; the entitlements are the assessment summary and the award notice. Buyers often say yes anyway, and the ones building a market for their next procurement have every reason to.
- Hunt for errors, not adjectives. A score that contradicts its own
justification, an award criterion applied that was never published, a sum that does not add up: those are the findings worth escalating while the standstill holds the contract unsigned. Adjectives you disagree with are not.
Should you challenge?
Mostly, no. Procurement challenges are expensive, slow and, in our view, rarely the right call, and the deadlines are short: for most claims under the Act you must issue proceedings within 30 days of when you knew, or ought to have known, about the problem. A court can extend that for good reason, but not beyond three months from the same starting point. If your assessment summary reveals a demonstrable scoring error, say so in writing immediately and plainly, because a buyer faced with a clear error during standstill still has room to put it right, and the remedies narrow sharply once the contract is signed. That letter costs you little and preserves your position while you take proper advice.
But be honest with yourself about the base rate. Most second places are not scoring errors. They are evidence gaps, and the energy you would spend fighting one decision is nearly always worth more in the next bid.
The habits that keep an answer at 7 out of 10
Run enough bid reviews and the same three habits turn up in almost every losing submission that “should have won”:
- Claims without proof. “We have extensive experience” scores what it proves,
which is nothing. A named contract, a date, a number and a person survive moderation; adjectives do not.
- Answering the topic instead of the criterion. A genuinely good essay about
your approach scores badly if it never maps itself onto the published wording the evaluator must justify the mark against. Use their words, cover every element, evidence each one.
- Generic method. An answer that could have been submitted to any buyer reads
as exactly that. Their sites, their risks, their calendar, their residents: specificity is the cheapest mark gain there is.
If your letters keep saying “good submission” while the score says 7, the gap between those two statements is usually one of these three.
There is also a case for having a bid looked at after you have sent it. Almost everybody who commissions a review commissions it under deadline, which is the worst moment to hear anything worth hearing, because there is no time left to act on it. A review run once the bid is gone has no such pressure, and what falls out of it tends to be concrete: this paragraph, this evidence, this claim you could not support. Those go into your bid library and get used again. Some of the most valuable work on a bid happens nowhere near a deadline.
Our bid reviews exist for precisely this situation: a compliance audit, a persuasion gap analysis and prioritised recommendations, run by a team that includes APMP-certified writers and ex-evaluators.
Keep a loss ledger
One assessment summary tells you about one bid. Three tell you about your business. Log every loss: the criterion, the weighting, your score, the buyer’s stated reason, in one place. Patterns appear fast, and they are rarely flattering: the same social value question scored 6 three times running, the same mobilisation section called thin by two different buyers. That repeat offender is your highest-return fix, and no single debrief letter would ever have shown it to you.
Buyers are told to keep their evaluation records for at least three years. Keep yours at least as well, and the question at the top of this post stops being rhetorical.