What does MAT change?
The name and the frame. Most economically advantageous tender belonged to the legacy directives era; most advantageous tender belongs to the Act, assessed against award criteria the buyer sets and publishes, with conditions of participation handled separately. The practical change for a bidder: read selection evidence and tender scoring as two exercises sharing a timetable, not one exercise with two names. Participation proof is on PSQ and conditions of participation; this page is the scoring half.
MAT does not prescribe one evaluation formula. The buyer’s schedule does: weights, sub-criteria, price mechanics, social value slice. General scoring mechanics are on evaluation criteria and weightings; the regime change that renamed the exercise is on what changed for suppliers.
A labelled hypothetical
Hypothetical, invented weights and scores to show the behaviour, not a buyer’s schedule and not a client result. Quality 50 percent, price 30, social value 20. Your quality leads by six points; the rival undercuts price enough to take the price criterion by twelve. Net: quality times one-half outweighs price times three-tenths, and the social slice (costed commitments, evidenced) decides the residual. Reverse the weights and the arithmetic reverses with them.
The lesson is order of operations, identical across regimes: extract weights, score your evidence honestly, model price points, then decide the offer. Social value’s current and forthcoming models have their own page (which model and weighting apply) because its bands move independently of the rest.
What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?
If the weights sit on evidence you do not hold, no deliverable price fixes the total; that is a no-bid before the pricing workshop. If they reward what you hold, price to the published method and check margin survives. Selection failures and scoring failures are different rows in the lessons register: know which one lost before the next gate.