Building a government cleaning tender response that survives evaluation

A government evaluation panel does not award work to the firm that wants it most. It awards work to the response that can be scored against a published plan, defended to a probity adviser, and filed. If your method is good and your evidence is in the wrong chapter, you have written a brochure. If your evidence is complete and your method is a slogan, you have written a filing cabinet. The panel needs both, in their order, inside their limit.

This is the unglamorous half of winning commercial cleaning tenders. The portal, the go/no-go and the site inspection still apply. What changes on public work is the machinery: weighted criteria, mandatory conditions, local content, modern slavery, WHS plans that will be read by someone who inspects for a living, and insurance certificates that must match the ABN on the form. The contracts and tendering hub exists because that machinery is now how a large share of Australian cleaning hours are bought.

Read the evaluation plan before you write a sentence

Commonwealth entities buy under the Commonwealth Procurement Rules. States and territories have their own procurement frameworks; local governments have tender thresholds and procedures under their local-government legislation. You do not need to recite the rule number in the bid. You do need to treat the evaluation plan in the request as the only marking guide that matters.

Typical non-price criteria on a cleaning tender are capability and capacity, methodology, past performance, WHS, environmental management, and sometimes local or social outcomes. Price is either a separate criterion with its own weight or a value-for-money assessment after a quality threshold. The weights are not decoration. If methodology is 30 per cent and price is 40, a beautiful labour story will not rescue a number the panel cannot defend. If WHS is a mandatory pass/fail, a missing Safe Work Method Statement is not a low score. It is a door closed.

Print the criteria and the response schedule. Answer in that order, using their headings. If they ask six sub-questions under methodology, those are six marks. Combining them into a narrative paragraph because it “reads better” is how you give the panel nothing to tick.

The panel is not your customer. It is a committee

An evaluation panel on a public cleaning contract is usually a small group: a contract manager, a facilities person who knows the buildings, sometimes a WHS adviser, sometimes procurement. On larger arrangements there is a probity adviser in the room or on the papers. They will read you in parallel, then moderate. They are not allowed to use the knowledge that you did a good job on the civic centre in 2019 unless that job is in the response. They are not allowed to ring you for a chat that the other tenderers do not get.

Write for a reader who is tired, who is scoring twelve bids, and who will be asked to justify a one-point difference. Short paragraphs. Evidence next to the claim. Names and dates of buildings, not “various government sites”. If a criterion asks for two examples, give two complete examples, not five half-examples.

Conflicts of interest are declared on their side and on yours. If you already clean a building in the precinct, or you employ someone who used to sit on the buyer’s side of the table, say so in the form they provided. Surprise is what probity processes exist to prevent.

Page limits, fonts and the death of the appendix dump

Government requests have become stricter about volume because contractors used to win by weight. If the response schedule says ten pages plus attachments A to D, that is the bid. The panel’s instructions usually say to stop at the limit or to disregard material that should have been in the scored pages. Putting the entire method in an appendix labelled “for information” is a well-known way to have it unread.

Use the font and margin they specified. Do not shrink eleven-point type to get another three hundred words of company history. Do not spend the first page on a covering letter that restates the table of contents. Start with the first criterion.

A compliance library still belongs on the shelf: current insurance certificates, workers-compensation currency in the relevant state or territory, financial statements if requested, quality-system certificates if you hold them, licences, and the policies you can actually show a supervisor. Keep those documents named and dated so you can drop them into the attachment list without a Friday night panic. Do not attach a 90-page employee handbook and call it a WHS plan.

Local content is not a slogan about being nearby

Jurisdictions ask for local participation in different ways. Victoria has Local Jobs First on eligible work. The Commonwealth has Australian Industry Participation on some procurements, and an Indigenous Procurement Policy with mandatory minimums on others. States and councils often ask how many hours will be delivered by people who live in the region, whether you will use local suppliers for chemicals and waste, and whether apprentices or trainees are in the roster. None of that is satisfied by a sentence that says you are proudly based in the state.

Be specific and conservative. If you will employ from the town, say how you will recruit and who will supervise. If you cannot, do not promise a local workforce you will then bus in from the capital. Evaluation panels have seen the promise; they have also seen the first month’s timesheets. Regional work that you cannot staff is a reason to decline the tender, not a reason to invent a storefront.

SME participation plans are similar. If you are the SME, say so plainly — legal entity, headcount band, where the owners live. If you are a larger firm offering to subcontract, name the work you will actually pass on. A “we may consider local subcontractors” paragraph scores as vapour.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation, where it is a criterion or a mandatory plan, is not a logo in the footer. If you are Supply Nation registered, or you have a genuine joint venture or subcontract, evidence it. If you are not, do not borrow someone else’s identity for a paragraph. Panels and later audits will ask.

Modern slavery is a supply-chain question, not a poster

The Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) requires reporting entities at or above the Act’s consolidated-revenue threshold to publish an annual statement. That threshold is not a cleaning-industry urban myth; it is in the statute, and it is the figure you should check on the responsible Commonwealth department’s site before you quote it in a bid. Most cleaning contractors are not reporting entities. Many government buyers will still require a questionnaire, a policy, or a statement of how you manage labour risk in your own crews and in any subcontract or labour-hire chain.

Answer the questionnaire you were sent. Useful content, if they leave you a free-text box, is unromantic: you engage cleaners as employees under the Cleaning Services Award 2020; you do not hold passports; you pay through a payroll you can produce; labour-hire, if used, is licensed in the jurisdictions that require a licence; you can trace who was on site on a given night. If you use subcontractors, say how you check they are doing the same. If you cannot see into a labour chain, that is a risk — do not paper over it with a downloaded policy.

New South Wales has its own modern-slavery legislation affecting some public entities and their suppliers. If the buyer is a NSW agency, read their schedule, not a Commonwealth template you used last year.

This journal will not invent prevalence numbers for you. The editorial standards exist specifically so we do not flatten a statutory regime into a marketing statistic. Your bid should show the same restraint.

WHS plans that a regulator could recognise

A WHS chapter that lists “safety is our priority” and attaches a generic manual will fail a serious panel and should fail. What they want is evidence that you can run this building without injuring someone, and that you know which regulator you are talking about.

Most jurisdictions have adopted the model Work Health and Safety laws. Victoria still operates under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic). If the buildings are in more than one state, say how the system flexes. Name the tasks that actually injure cleaners: wet floors, manual handling, chemical use, sharps in amenities and waste rooms, night work and lone work, violence or aggression in public buildings, traffic around docks, and work at height in atriums. Attach Safe Work Method Statements for those tasks, not for a warehouse you do not have.

Induction, consultation, incident reporting and first aid should be described as a process that happens on this contract: who inducts, who the health and safety representative can talk to, how a needle-stick is handled at 11pm, how you will isolate a chemical spill in a school. If you are bidding a hospital, a food plant or a transport precinct, the site’s own permit systems outrank your poster. Say that you will work inside them.

Workers compensation is part of WHS evidence as well as insurance evidence. Certificates of currency must match the state of the work. A New South Wales policy does not cover a Queensland crew just because the company is registered in Sydney.

Insurance certificates are a conforming-bid issue

Public buyers are pedantic about certificates because they have been burned. They want public liability at the limit in the request — often $10 million or $20 million for cleaning in occupied buildings — workers compensation, and motor vehicle if you will drive onto the site. Some ask for professional indemnity. Some ask to be noted as an interested party. Some require the certificate to be less than a specified number of days old at closing.

The name on the certificate must be the bidding entity. A trust, a company and a registered business name are not interchangeable. If you operate through a group, get the broker to issue a certificate that names the entity on the tender form. Do it in week one, not on closing afternoon.

If you cannot obtain the requested limit in time, that is a go/no-go, not a paragraph of explanation in the insurance chapter. Non-conforming bids are discarded before scoring on a lot of government work.

Mandatory conditions, alternative tenders and the things you must not invent

Conditions for participation — valid ABN, no insolvency, required licences, attendance at a mandatory briefing — are pass/fail. Read them twice. If you missed the briefing, do not ask for a private tour and a late acceptance. Probity will not allow it, and the project officer who likes you is not allowed to like you that much.

Alternative tenders are sometimes permitted: a conforming bid plus a second offer that changes the method, the hours or the packaging of buildings. Only write the alternative if the request invites it and if you have first lodged a conforming response. An alternative that quietly deletes weekend cleaning is not clever. It is non-conforming.

Do not invent accreditations. Do not put a quality-system logo on the cover if the certificate lapsed. Do not claim a Cleaning Accountability Framework arrangement or an ISO certificate you do not hold. Government reference checks and later contract-management audits are quite capable of asking for the PDF.

Price, clarifications and the preferred-tenderer week

Price on government work is submitted in their schedule. Complete every cell they provided. If a cell does not apply, follow their instruction for marking it — do not leave it blank and do not write a novel in a numeric field. Keep your own labour build-up, including Award penalties and the access constraints you took from reading the specification, so you can survive a clarification question that asks why one building is dearer than another.

Clarifications come through the portal and are often issued to all tenderers in anonymised form. Answer in writing, through the portal, inside the deadline. Do not pick up the phone to “give them some context”. That context is either given to everyone or it is a probity incident.

If you are named preferred tenderer, you have not won. You have been invited to negotiate the things they always intended to negotiate: commencement date, mobilisation, sometimes a price normalisation, sometimes a tightening of the service level agreement. Read the final contract. Check that the specification you priced is the specification attached. Check that unpaid variations have a process. Then, and only then, resign from the other bid you were keeping warm.

A government win is a public document in a way a commercial win is not. The hours, the people and the complaints will be visible to an opposition staffer, a union organiser and the next evaluation panel. Write the response as if all three will read it. They will.