Bridging the Procurement Gap

Abstract

Infrastructure renewal projects are urgent, necessary, and publicly valuable, but this does not automatically make them attractive to contractors. In a capacity-constrained construction market, renewal tenders must compete for scarce contractor resources against alternative opportunities. Attracting suitable contractors is therefore essential, making contractor participation an explicit procurement design concern. Procurement design can improve a tender's competitive position by making opportunities clearer, more manageable, more proportionate, and more commercially viable.

The attractiveness of infrastructure renewal tenders depends on how public clients translate renewal work into tender opportunities and how contractors evaluate them. Public-client choices regarding the object being procured, the form of collaboration, and the market approach shape the work and conditions contractors evaluate during their bid/no-bid decisions.

On the contractor side, the bid/no-bid decision reflects the interaction between work attractiveness and condition attractiveness relative to alternative opportunities. Work attractiveness concerns whether a contractor wants, can deliver, and has a credible chance of winning the work. Condition attractiveness concerns contractual, financial, technical, and procedural viability. Comparing contractor evaluations with client choices demonstrates how procurement design shapes opportunity attractiveness.

This comparison shows that attractiveness emerges from combinations of procurement design elements within the specific renewal context. To guide this configuration process, public clients should adopt seven procurement design principles:

1. Recognise renewal context: Recognise the complex, uncertain, and market conditions of infrastructure renewal and reflect this in appropriate procurement.
2. Reduce uncertainty before tendering: Build asset knowledge and scope clarity before approaching the market.
3. Create an executable and commercially viable workload: Consider scale, bundling, continuity, pipeline visibility, and repeatability.
4. Match residual uncertainty to risk allocation, collaboration, and pricing: Configure risk allocation, contract form, collaboration, and pricing mechanisms as a coherent response to remaining uncertainty.
5. Involve the market at the right time and for a clear purpose: Use early contractor involvement to optimise decisions without substituting for the client’s responsibility to define the tender.
6. Provide a credible and proportionate route to contract award: Keep tender effort proportionate, allow meaningful differentiation, and provide a credible chance of winning.
7. Use procurement design as a balancing mechanism: Balance contractor participation against public-client objectives to secure sufficient suitable competition at an acceptable value for money.

Rather than aiming to maximize attractiveness unconditionally, these principles guide public clients in balancing market participation with public value. Effective application depends heavily on client maturity and institutional capacity, as well as clear communication from contractors regarding their selection logic.

To derive these insights, the research followed a sequential mixed-methods design. First, the public procurement process was reconstructed using a decision tree and mapped into a morphological chart. Second, tender selection data from a case-study contractor were analysed using cross-tabulations and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), supplemented by semi-structured interviews. Finally, these findings were combined into a configuration set to establish the principles.

Ultimately, while procurement design cannot increase total sector capacity or alter brownfield constraints, it shapes how these constraints are reflected in individual tenders. Its contribution lies in reducing avoidable unattractiveness and improving alignment, enabling public clients to compete more effectively for scarce contractor capacity.