Which KPI duties apply?
The Act regime imposes KPI-setting, monitoring, and publication duties on covered contracts, with scope and threshold exceptions that remove smaller or out-of-scope work from the full machinery. At £5 million and above, social-value KPIs join the statutory set and publish on the central platform; see which model applies. Confirm the contract’s position against the Manage-phase guidance before building a compliance apparatus: duties assumed where exceptions apply waste pursuit and delivery hours alike, and duties missed where they apply become breach findings.
What do payment terms oblige?
Milestones, verification mechanics, payment clocks, and interest on late payment, plus flow-down expectations toward subcontractors that mirror the policy logic Australian readers know from Commonwealth supplier payments. Model the cash position the way payment terms and cash-flow risk describes (milestones against verification delays, not headlines against hope) because this page finds obligations while that page does the arithmetic. The economic effects of deductions live on KPIs, abatement and service credits, deliberately not repeated here.
How do performance notices escalate?
Notice, cure, credit, rights, exit. The ladder varies by contract but the shape recurs: formal notice of underperformance, a cure window, financial consequences, step-in or suspension rights, and termination. Read the whole ladder before signature: a benign-looking KPI section with a short cure fuse and hair-trigger termination is a different contract than its headings suggest. After-award timelines that precede all of this are on assessment summaries and standstill.
What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?
Obligations that cannot be staffed, evidenced, or funded are risk fails in week one, priced now or walked from now. A contract whose KPI and notice machinery exceeds the firm’s contract-management maturity is not a delivery challenge; it is a breach schedule with a signature page.