I write the quality and social value sections for CQC-registered providers bidding for local authority contracts. Fixed price per section. Everything in writing.
Send me a tender Send any live notice and I will read it for you, free — what the buyer appears to be scoring, and an honest bid or no-bid view.On a local authority care contract the written answers decide it. Sometimes they carry the whole score; sometimes they are only the gate you must pass before price is looked at — Kent set a 60% quality threshold and then awarded on the lowest hourly price. In May 2026 Bury Council put its home care contract out under the Procurement Act 2023 — six lots, £81m — and published the award criteria for every one of them as quality 100%. Price was not scored at all. That is Find a Tender notice 042051-2026; you can read it yourself. Of the older methodologies I have collected, the two that state a price weighting put quality above it — quality 80% against price 20% at Leicester in 2013, and at Brent in 2023 quality 50% and social value 10% against price 40%. Elsewhere quality is a gate you must pass before price is looked at at all. Either way it decides whether you are still in the race — and it is the part written at eleven at night, by a registered manager who has already done a full day.
Tower Hamlets puts it plainly in its domiciliary care method statement: “Any information that exceeds the word limits stated will be excluded from evaluation.” An answer that runs long is not marked down — the part past the limit is simply not read.
Describing what you do earns “may lack details on how the requirement will be fulfilled in certain areas” — Kent’s own band 2, quoted in full further down this page, and a middle band. Showing what you did, with a name, a date and a number attached, is what the top band asks for. The gap is not knowledge.
Insurance dates, registration details, declarations, file formats. None of it earns a mark. Any of it can end the bid before a word is read.
In 2023, under the previous regulations, the London Borough of Brent published the evaluation outcome for its Honeypot Lane Extra Care contract. Thirteen bids were received. Seven were rejected as non-compliant and never reached the quality evaluation — two had not submitted the pricing schedule, three were missing required documents, two had not met a stated requirement.
Of the six that were read, four more were excluded for scoring 2 or less on two or more questions. Two bids remained.
And the winning bid was not flawless. Across the six quality questions, marked out of five, it scored 4, 3, 3, 4, 4 and 4 — and full marks on nothing.
That is the shape of this. You do not need brilliance. You need every answer above the floor, and not one compliance mistake — and most bids lose on the second of those.
No day rates, no quotes, no scope creep. You know the cost before you commit, and it does not move. No VAT is chargeable on these fees — Fenris Ltd is not VAT registered.
Send me any live notice. Two pages back within 48 hours: what this buyer appears to value, what you would actually be entering, and an honest view on whether it is worth your evenings. Written from the published notice, so I can do it before we have ever spoken.
Once you have the questionnaire, send it to me. Which questions carry the marks, the pass/fail traps, where the word limits will hurt, and what to have ready before you start writing. This is the part no free assessment can do, because it needs the documents.
You have a draft — yours, or one a tool wrote for you. I score it the way the evaluator will, sub-criterion by sub-criterion, with the specific change that moves each one into the top band. If the fixes are yours to make in an hour, I will tell you that and take no further money.
Most tenders have one or two questions that decide the award. This is that question, written to the buyer's published scoring standard, in the top band. Five working days, one round of revisions.
Every scored written question for one tender — drafted, evidenced, and consistent across answers. This is where I would start you, because the questions are marked as a set and inconsistency between them is itself a scoring problem.
One tender written each month, plus Notice Reads, Triage and Scored Review on fair use. If volume ever made that impossible I would tell you before the next month began. For providers who have stopped deciding whether a bid is worth the evening.
The guarantee. I do not promise you will win. Nobody can, and you should be careful with anyone who does. I promise something narrower and checkable: if a section I drafted breaches a compliance requirement stated in the tender documents — a word limit, a mandatory element, a prescribed format, a declaration I wrote — and the buyer records that as the reason it was excluded or scored zero, I refund that section's fee in full.
Claim within 30 days of the buyer’s decision. It does not cover compliance items you supply and I never see, and it does not cover a section that is read, marked and simply scores less than you hoped. Where I wrote a full quality set, the refund is the proportionate share for the section concerned, not the whole fee. The full terms say so plainly, so there is nothing to argue about later.
Scope, fixed price and deadline are agreed in writing before you pay anything. Nothing is agreed on a call, so there is nothing to remember differently later.
You will see bid consultancies advertising win rates of 78, 85, 93 and 94 per cent.
The Open Contracting Partnership analysed the Find a Tender data for the first year of the Procurement Act 2023. Procedures preceded by a preliminary market engagement notice or a planned procurement notice averaged 4.7 bids, and 3.8 where it did not.
In a competition for a single contract, one bid wins — so across single-award competitions the share of submitted bids that win is somewhere around a quarter. That arithmetic does not carry over to frameworks and dynamic markets, where many suppliers are admitted and a high success rate can be perfectly honest.
Which is the real problem with a published percentage: it does not tell you what was counted. Every bid submitted, only the ones where an outcome came back, or only the ones the firm chose to enter? A consultancy that declines the bids it expects to lose raises its number without improving a single word.
So here is what I will publish instead. When I have wins, I will publish the Find a Tender notice references alongside them, so you can look each one up and see who was awarded what.
And when there are enough engagements to calculate it honestly, I will publish a capture ratio — total value won divided by total value submitted, with the denominator stated. It is much harder to game, and I have not found a UK bid consultancy that publishes one.
Until then, the honest answer to "what is your win rate" is that I have not written enough bids for the number to mean anything.
You are considering sending a stranger your tender and your money. The reasonable thing to want first is to see the work.
This is a complete response to a real, published opportunity: one method statement, written comfortably inside the 1,000-word limit such questions typically carry, with margin left for the bidder’s own evidence. The opportunity is public, and no client's material has been used anywhere in it.
Pages five and six are the part worth your time. It sets out how the answer was built against the scoring criteria — why it is shaped like the question, why every claim is anchored to the buyer's own published standard, why the commitments are numbers rather than adjectives, and why the word budget was planned before a sentence was written.
Every point a real bidder would have to evidence is marked [EVIDENCE: …]. Those are the only things I would ask you for. The structure, the standards mapping, the tables and the wording are mine.
You send the notice. I send back a written scope, a fixed price and a start date the same working day. Nothing is agreed on a call, so there is nothing to remember differently afterwards.
That is not me being unavailable. Anything you want to ask, I answer in writing the same working day — and you will still have the answer in your inbox six weeks later, when the deadline arrives and you need it.
A link or reference number is enough to start.
Eight questions, about fifteen minutes. Type it, or record a voice note if that is quicker for you.
48 hours for a triage. Five working days for a full section.
Your voice, your evidence, your submission. One round of revisions included.
How I get your specifics without a meeting. One brief, eight questions. Then one evidence list, once, at the start — not seven emails over a fortnight asking for one more figure.
Scales vary by buyer — 0–4, 0–5 and 0–10 all appear in published methodologies, so anyone who tells you there is one scale has not read many. What does not vary is what moves a band. This is the scale in Appendix B: Award Criteria and Quality Questions, published by Kent County Council’s Adult Social Care Cabinet Committee on 12 March 2019 for its Care and Support in the Home Services (Phase 1) contract, quoted in full:
| Score | What the evaluator is looking for |
|---|---|
| 4 · Excellent | “Response is completely relevant and excellent overall. The response is comprehensive, unambiguous and demonstrates a thorough understanding of the requirement and provides details of how the requirement will be met in full.” |
| 3 · Good | “Response is relevant and good. The response is sufficiently detailed to demonstrate a good understanding and provides details on how the requirements will be fulfilled.” |
| 2 · Acceptable | “The response is relevant and acceptable. The response addresses a broad understanding of the requirement but may lack details on how the requirement will be fulfilled in certain areas.” |
| 1 · Poor | “The response is partially relevant and poor. The response addresses some elements of the requirement but contains insufficient/limited detail or explanation to demonstrate how the requirement will be fulfilled.” |
| 0 · Unacceptable | “Nil or inadequate response. Fails to demonstrate an ability to meet any of the requirements. Does not have any understanding of the need.” |
Look at what actually moves the band. It is not better writing. It is “provides details of how the requirement will be met in full” — every piece of evidence the buyer asked for, at the level of detail they asked for. That pattern holds across every published scheme I have collected.
The same document sets minimum scores: 3 out of 4 on service delivery and on workforce, 2 on the rest, and 60% overall. On that contract an "acceptable" answer fails the two questions carrying the highest minimum. Buyers publish this sort of thing, and it is easy to miss.
Every answer I write is scored against the buyer's scale by a second, deliberately hostile pass before it goes back to you.
Cabinet Office PPN 017 (issued November 2023, updated February 2025) says suppliers’ use of AI "is not prohibited during the commercial process but steps should be taken to understand the risks associated with the use of AI tools in this context, as would be the case if a bid writer has been used by the supplier". The three example disclosure questions it publishes for buyers are all marked "For Information Only (Not Scored)".
One honest caveat. PPN 017 applies to central government departments, their executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies. Other authorities only “may wish to apply” it, so a council is not bound by it — and the PPN itself says buyers “can however continue to ask and evaluate any further relevant questions about use of AI”. A council may lawfully ask its own AI question and score it. Treat PPN 017 as the reference point most buyers work from, not as a rule that protects you.
Which is why disclosure matters. If a buyer asks and you answer "no" because nobody told you, your submission contains inaccurate information — and under the Procurement Act 2023 that is your problem, not mine.
Every engagement comes with a short disclosure paragraph you can put straight into your submission. What AI does not do is decide what will score, check your draft against the buyer's rubric, or tell you when an answer of its own is a 2. That part is the job.
One email is enough. No form to fill in, no call to book. If all you have is a notice reference, that is enough for the free read.
There is a phone line — 0330 043 3911 — and it goes to a voicemail I answer in writing, usually the same working day. If you would rather leave a message than type one, leave one.
Email hello@thebidroom.co.uk