How a small firm actually wins public-sector water hygiene work

Public-sector water hygiene work runs through four routes, and a small firm loses most often on the parts of the bid it treats as boilerplate, rather than on price or competence. Name the routes first. A PQQ screens you in or out. An ITT is the actual bid. A DPS lets you join a standing list and bid when work appears. A framework is a multi-year panel you sit on for priority access.

Then the thing nobody at a 5 to 15 person firm wants to hear: the section you are probably under-answering, social value, is often the one that decides it. A council or NHS trust rarely awards to the cheapest credible bidder. They award on a scored total, and the scores small firms leave on the table are as much about how they wrote the bid as what they can do.

The four routes, and which one you are actually looking at

Bid Writing Service's water hygiene guide sets out the four cleanly, and it is worth knowing which you face before you spend a week writing.

• A PQQ (pre-qualification questionnaire) is a screening stage. It asks whether you are a credible, safe, solvent firm before anyone reads your method. Pass and you are invited to bid; fail and you never get the chance.
• An ITT (invitation to tender) is the real bid: method statements, pricing schedules, mobilisation plans. This is where the work is won or lost.
• A DPS (dynamic purchasing system) lets you apply and join at any time, then bid for individual contracts as they are published. It suits small firms, because you are not locked out until the next tender cycle comes round.
• A framework is a two to four year panel. Get on it and you get priority access to a buyer's work, usually after passing both a PQQ and an ITT to qualify.

The practical read: a DPS or a framework is where a small firm builds a pipeline, because both let you win repeatedly off one qualification effort instead of starting cold each time. Work out which one a buyer is running before you commit an engineer's week to writing it, because the effort a DPS repays across many mini-competitions is wasted on a single ITT you are unlikely to win.

What a PQQ actually wants to see

A water hygiene PQQ is an evidence exam. Expect to show, at minimum, demonstrable competence against ACoP L8 and HSG274 Parts 1 to 3, BS 8580 risk assessment and BS 7592 sampling, plus LCA membership, ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 certification, and SSIP accreditation such as CHAS or SafeContractor. If you are not yet an LCA member, sort that before you chase public work; we covered joining the LCA separately.

The failure mode here is rarely missing the credentials. It is not being able to lay hands on them fast. A PQQ lands with a three-week clock, and if your ISO certificates, insurance schedules, method statements and named-engineer competencies live in four inboxes and a filing cabinet, you spend the first week just assembling what you already have. Firms that bid regularly keep a single, current library of every certificate, policy and standard method statement, so the answer to "attach evidence of X" is a two-minute retrieval, not a two-day hunt.

Social value is where small firms lose

Here is the part most small bids get wrong. Since PPN 06/20, central government contracts must weight social value at a minimum of 10%, and in practice it runs 10 to 20% of the total score, often the margin that decides a close bid. Small firms routinely treat it as a box-tick and write three vague sentences about supporting the local community.

That is points handed to a competitor who answered it properly. Social value wants specifics you can actually deliver and measure: local apprenticeships, the number of engineers you will train, carbon reduction on your travel, spend with local suppliers, work with schools or ex-forces hiring. A small firm can often out-answer a national here, because a national's social value is spread thin across the country while yours is concrete and local. Most small firms simply do not try, and hand the points over. The fix is a short list of commitments you can actually keep and measure, costed like any other line of the bid, so the evaluator reads a plan rather than three more sentences about the local community.

Where the work is listed now

Since Brexit, UK public contracts above threshold are advertised on the Find a Tender service, which replaced the EU's OJEU and TED. Lower-value opportunities also appear on Contracts Finder and various regional portals. On top of that, the Procurement Act 2023 has changed how public buyers run competitions, so a process you learned five years ago may not be the one you meet now. Register on the portals that cover your patch, set alerts for water hygiene and legionella, and read a few live ITTs before you need to bid one, so the format is familiar when a winnable job appears.

An ITT also wants a priced schedule, and a public buyer will hold you to it for the life of the contract. Price it from your real asset counts and costs, not the number you hope wins; we set out how to price the work elsewhere, and a public tender is the worst place to discover you priced it short.

The honest limits

There are no reliable published figures on how often small firms win public tenders, so treat anyone quoting you a win rate with suspicion. What is knowable is the process, and the process rewards preparation over inspiration: qualify once via a DPS or framework, keep your evidence current and retrievable, and answer social value like it counts, because it does.

This is a different animal from subcontracting to a facilities management company, where the terms arrive as a contract to sign rather than a tender to win. If your route to bigger work runs through FMs instead of public buyers, the clauses to read before signing are a separate discipline. Both reward the same underlying thing: knowing exactly what you can prove.

The thread through all of it is evidence you can produce on demand. A PQQ is really a test of whether your compliance history is organised. BlueWave keeps the delivered records, completed visits, temperature logs, remedial actions and the certificates and method statements behind them, in one place with who-did-what-when timestamps, so the compliance records a bid asks for are a search rather than an archaeology dig. It will not write your social value section. It does mean the evidence half of a PQQ stops being the reason you missed the deadline.

Read a few live ITTs before you need to bid one. The firm that wins its first public contract is usually the one that spent an unglamorous month getting its evidence in order before a single tender landed.