Every few years, like others, the waste industry goes through the same ritual. A tender lands, the weightings look sensible, the questions look robust; everyone nods earnestly and talks about quality partnerships.
And then someone wins it by being spectacularly cheap. Not efficient, not innovative and definitely not demonstrably better; just cheaper and everyone pretends to be surprised. On paper, most public-sector waste tenders follow a familiar structure:-• Quality: 60%
• Price: 40%
It looks balanced; it feels responsible and seems to tick all the governance boxes. The theory is sound: reward good service while protecting public money. The reality however can be gamed and often is because proportional price scoring has a mathematical gravity that many procurement teams quietly underestimate.
Under proportional scoring, the lowest price almost always anchors the entire competition. Once that anchor is dropped, everyone else is fighting uphill regardless of how strong their quality submission is. What this creates in practice is a very predictable strategy; submit a compliant (not exceptional) quality response then go aggressively low on price and let the scoring model do the heavy lifting. If the quality questions are not sufficiently discriminating and being honest, many aren’t, the pricing lever becomes disproportionately powerful.
At that point, the tender stops being a question of who will deliver the best service and quietly becomes one of who is most willing to take the commercial risk and those are not the same question.
Inside our industry, most experienced operators recognise the pattern. Broadly speaking, bidders tend to fall into two camps: -
1. The Delivery-Led Bidder
• Prices based on known disposal costs
• Builds in realistic crew assumptions
• Allows for reporting, compliance and account management
• Expects to actually deliver what was written in the quality submission
2. The Margin-Chasing Bidder
• Prices to win first
• Works out the delivery model later
• Relies on operational stretch, variation income, or future renegotiation
• Knows the maths of proportional scoring inside out
When a contract is effectively bought, the consequences rarely appear on day one. The mobilisation looks fine; the launch meeting is full of enthusiasm and everyone posts something optimistic on LinkedIn.
The stress shows up later; typically in the form of service inconsistency, reporting gaps, account management drift, operational shortcuts or the inevitable quiet reappearance of “cost pressures” 12 months in and none of this is inevitable.
Experienced clients know this but many just don’t model for it properly at tender stage. To be clear, this isn’t about blaming procurement teams. Most are working within rigid frameworks and doing their best to balance cost and compliance but there is a recurring blind spot in waste tenders. The scoring model often assumes all compliant bids are operationally equal when they’re definitely not. In waste services, particularly multi-stream, compliance-heavy environments; small pricing gaps can reflect very different delivery assumptions:-
- Crew structure
- Supervision levels
- Data and reporting investment
- Contingency capacity
- Compliance overhead
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