Assessment summaries under the Procurement Act 2023 — how to read yours

Pactis Partners · 2026

When you lose a public tender now, the buyer has to tell you how your bid scored against the winner. It arrives as an assessment summary, it is usually read once with some irritation and filed, and it is the most useful document your bid team will receive this year.

What changed

The Procurement Act 2023 took effect for procurements started on or after 24 February 2025. Among the changes to transparency, contracting authorities must provide each tenderer with an assessment summary before the contract award notice is published: an explanation of how the authority assessed that supplier's tender against the award criteria and — for unsuccessful bidders — how it assessed the most advantageous tender. A standstill period of eight working days normally follows the award notice, during which a bidder can raise a challenge. Some awards are exempt — certain direct awards and framework call-offs, for example — and parts of the winner's assessment can be withheld for confidentiality.

In practice this means you receive, in writing, the buyer's own account of what it rewarded and where you fell short — question by question.

What a good summary contains

• Your score on each criterion, and the winning bid's score on the same criterion
• The reasons for your score, tied to the published scoring definitions
• Where the winner did better, the characteristics that earned the higher mark

Quality varies. Some authorities produce two careful pages per question; some copy the rubric text with a number beside it. Even a thin summary shows the pattern once you know how to read it.

How to read one

1. Find the gap that decided it. Multiply each criterion's score difference by its weighting. Usually two or three questions account for the whole margin. Those are the ones that matter; ignore the rest.
2. Classify each lost mark. Was the evidence missing, misplaced (present but not where the question looked), unclear, or genuinely weaker than the winner's? The fix is different for each. Misplaced evidence is the most common and the cheapest to fix.
3. Translate the buyer's language. "Limited detail on…" means the evaluator could not find something specific. "Did not fully demonstrate…" means assertion without proof. "Would have benefited from…" tells you exactly what to add next time.
4. Look for the pressure. Where the winner scored higher, the summary usually reveals what the buyer was anxious about — continuity, mobilisation, social value, data. That anxiety will be in the next tender too.

Read three side by side

One summary shows you a bid. Three, from different buyers, show you a bid team: the same criterion losing marks the same way, contract after contract. That is the pattern worth fixing, and it is normally structural — how answers are built — rather than a matter of writing harder.

If you think the scoring was wrong

The standstill period exists for that. A challenge is a legal step with real costs, so get advice quickly; the assessment summary is the evidence base either way.