What does the assessment summary give you?
The buyer’s account of how your tender scored (strengths, weaknesses, and position against the published criteria) issued with or around the award decision. Treat it first as qualification data: which criteria failed, which evidence was thin, which weights sat outside your shape. The reusable wording for requesting feedback sits on the debrief request letter (phrasing help, not a UK statutory form) and the Australian and NZ equivalents for cross-border readers are AU debriefs and NZ debriefs. Use all of it on the next gate, not to relitigate the last one.
When does standstill apply?
For covered awards under the Act regime: a standstill period of eight working days, during which the contract cannot be entered, giving unsuccessful suppliers time to consider their position, subject to exceptions that disapply it for certain procurements. Confirm applicability and the exact counting rules against the current assessment-summary, standstill, and remedies guidance before acting: working-day counting, trigger events, and exceptions are detail that summaries compress and getting them wrong forfeits the window. Legacy-regime awards run their own standstill logic; check which regime governs first.
What is the next-action triage?
- Debrief questions. Scoring, evidence gaps, winner’s relative advantages, ask promptly, use on the next bid.
- Remedy assessment. Process failures suggesting unlawfulness: counsel immediately, inside the window, not after it.
- Correspondence. Letters asking for explanations preserve no rights; run them in parallel with remedy advice, never instead of it.
Nothing on this page is legal advice. Time-sensitive remedy steps need a solicitor the same week, ideally the same day the summary lands.
What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?
It means the next one: record the scoring lesson with a follow-up date, the way lessons learned describes. Firms that treat every loss as a potential challenge bid angry and gate badly; firms that never examine summaries bid blind. Read, record, move on, unless counsel says stop.