European law, enacted in The Public Contracts regulations, gives every bidder for a public contract the right to have their bid fairly evaluated against declared award criteria. This means that the authority must explain the criteria which will be used for the selection of a preferred bidder, the protocols to be used in the evaluation and the relative weights of each criteria.
Public Authorities are not allowed to dismiss a bid without good cause, and notes must be made available to explain why they did so. Under the Freedom of Information Act, you can request any information you require to understand why your bid was unsuccessful.
If you believe your bid has not been given equal treatment to all the others, you can launch a challenge which could see a court awarding you your bid costs, opportunity costs or even punitive damages. They may even overturn the outcome of the competition to the extent of declaring the resulting contract ‘ineffective’ (in other words, void).
Unsuccessful bidders may have reservations about mounting a challenge, believing that doing so will disadvantage them in future bids. This is far from the case – any disadvantage would be illegal – and in many cases, frowned upon by the majority of civil servants, who are actually, very keen to see fair play.
If you are wondering why your carefully prepared bid failed to get chosen and are unhappy with the debrief given by a public authority, we can assist your team with forensic or ‘lessons learned’ investigations into the selection process. This can extend to working with your legal team in mounting a legal challenge and potentially recovering damages or forcing a judicial review of the decision.
Written reports on the analysis of the evaluation can be supported in court by the appearance of a Stablebridge expert witness.