​​Recycling service procurement tips for large businesses and organisations

Whatever the size of your organisation, it’s important to have the service delivered by a company with the right kind of experience. However, larger organisations with multiple sites and complex operational arrangements have more intensive waste disposal and recycling requirements, making it even more critical that the provider has the capacity and skills to provide the service that you want. 

Good to know

Procurement regulations are changing post-Brexit, so it’s worth checking whether you need to use the Public Contract Regulations 2015  for procuring waste and recycling services. This will depend on the value of the contract and which service sector you’re in. If you’re a public sector body or a certain utility sector body in the UK, you may need to comply with the public procurement regulations when you purchase contracts for goods, works and services from the private sector. Large public and utilities contracts are now advertised on Findatender. Public sector bodies in Northern Ireland also advertise their tender opportunities on the eTendersNI portal.

Before you start the recycling procurement process:

• Identify and assemble a team who can give you the information you need and who have the skills and time to specify the service and evaluate the tenders. Your Procurement Team can be drawn from internal staff, from external procurement specialists, or a combination of the two.

• Ensure the right people are involved up front – this will help prevent problems down the line.

• Identify who will manage the contract – this ensures that the service is delivered to the specification, but also that you’re doing your bit internally by correctly managing the waste and recycling so that it’s put in the right containers.

Soft market testing

You may want to check out the market before embarking on a formal process, as these early discussions can be very useful in helping you frame and specify the sort of service you want. You can do this informally or through a scheduled process, but it’s always best to not have all potential suppliers in the same room together, as this tends to prevent open conversation. Ask service providers for ideas as to how they think they can best provide and manage your recycling service and how they might solve some of the issues you may have.

The pre-qualification stage

A pre-qualification stage helps you to screen businesses by asking the usual factual questions about the company, but also questions about their financial standing, questions that can lead to mandatory exclusion and questions about their technical ability. By filtering out companies you definitely don’t want to work with, pre-qualification allows you to limit the number of companies you need to assess. However, you might wish to skip this stage and go straight to tendering.

Good to know

Both stages of procurement (pre-qualification and tendering) will need to comply with the procurement principles of equality and transparency and the RWIND principles (Reasonably Well-Informed, Normally Diligent), so that the documents produced will be understood by tenderers.

A pre-qualification stage works by setting ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ criteria and points against which you can score the responses. Here are some tips:

• Weight the quality criteria by importance to you: you can define, for instance, that you will take through to the main procurement stage, the three organisations that score highest on their quality scores, if they also pass the required financial thresholds and mandatory obligations.

• Be transparent: tell any bidders how you’re going to assess their responses, both at the pre-qualification stage and at final tender stage; this ensures you’re treating them fairly and there’s less likely to be a challenge to contract award at a later stage.

• Get your finance team involved: the financial standing questions will need to be set by your finance department, which may set a threshold regarding appropriate size/turnover of the company, depending on the scale, length and value of the contract you’re commissioning.

• Follow our guidance: our pre-qualification questionnaire guidance, example contract service specification and guidance on the procurement process will help you complete this process.