Tom Sykes on Procurement (and a Bit of Magic)
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Procurement doesn't have to be dreadful — and Tom Sykes makes a compelling case that it's actually one of the most important relationship-building exercises a parish or town council ever runs. Tom is the architect and founder of Common Works, a former Head of Design for Transport for London's property team, and an Expert for the Design Council. He's worked both sides of the public-sector tendering table and arrives with one clear thesis: at the heart of every tender document is a relationship, and the procurement exercise itself is where that relationship starts.
The episode opens with John's standard preamble — Tom's site visits, the physical foam-board model his team built of the Stroud Town Council retrofit (made by a graduate architect, scaled at 1 mm = 50 mm, used so you can imagine walking the corridor before it's built), and the small detail that Tom paid his way through architecture school doing close-up magic in London restaurants — £150 for a lunchtime residency. The one common mistake Tom flags upfront is proportionality: standing orders that demand three quotes for anything over £500 create huge overhead for clerks and waste suppliers' time on tiny pieces of work.
Then Tom's talk. He walks through the fundamentals — the Procurement Act 2023 thresholds (£215k for services, just over £5m for construction), the real cost of running a tender on both sides (clerks underestimating their own time; a small practice like Tom's spending £4–8k preparing a bid for a £40–80k contract; bigger firms spending £10–12k per bid and expecting to win one in ten) — and the big upstream question: do you even need a tender at all?
His three sourcing routes get the same honest treatment. Frameworks can be brilliant — the procurement process is mapped out for you, suppliers are pre-vetted — but the people who sell them are sometimes in morally grey territory; on a TfL project Tom worked on, two failed procurement exercises with the wrong panel ate four months. Contracts Finder is the weakest route because you have no idea who'll read your tender, and small practices self-select out assuming the big commercial firms will hoover it up. The curated short-list, Tom's preferred route, rewards the upfront work of meeting local suppliers and treating them as sounding boards.
The middle of the talk is a working guide to the tender document itself — the layered brief (core values → project ambitions → outputs → appointments required → policy context), the biggest mistakes to avoid (too many docs, too long, inconsistent deliverables, ambiguous priorities), and a five-tier scoring scale (deliberately not out of 100, because percentages make outstanding feel unachievable). Then the punchiest moment of the episode: don't evaluate cost. Tom argues that scoring by lowest price wrecks everyone else's quality scores — "one mad bastard puts in a really low fee, and suddenly the bulk of bids are scoring in the 60s or 70s" — and that deviation from mean is the right mechanism. His rule of thumb: cost no more than 70% of the weighting on construction contracts, and as low as 5% on consultancy.
The outro opens the episode back out. Tom takes a turn back to age 18 — putting on a two-week magic show at the Old Fire Station theatre in Oxford, six months of building props and street magic to drive ticket sales — and offers his younger self the opposite of Julie King's advice on the previous episode: take the world a bit more seriously.
Pay-it-forward: Julie left Tom her question about what piece of legislation he'd change if he could, and Tom answers with the case for a land value capture mechanism on all public projects, using the Jubilee Line extension as the worked example — £3 billion build cost, roughly £13 billion of property-value uplift inside a kilometre of each new station, captured entirely by the people who happened to own land there in the first place. Tom's outgoing question for Jamie Charters (CCLA Investment Management, joining on Episode 9): if you could take one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and add it to English, what would that word be?
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Questions answered in this episode
Drawn from our conversation with Tom Sykes, Architect, Client Advisor and Founder of Common Works — and former Head of Design at Transport for London. The answers below are editorial summaries of the discussion — not verbatim transcripts.
What's the Procurement Act 2023 threshold above which a parish council has to run a tender?
For **services**, councils can direct-award contracts up to **£215,000** without going to formal procurement. For **construction works**, the threshold is **just over £5 million**. Below those numbers, the Act doesn't compel a tender — though most councils' own standing orders set the bar considerably lower. The thresholds are worth knowing because they're the upper limit; how a council chooses to procure below them is a local policy decision, not an Act requirement.
My standing orders say "three quotes for anything over £500" — is that actually proportionate?
It's worth a periodic look. Standing orders that hard-wire three-quote rules at low values can create significant overhead — for the clerk running the process, and for the small local suppliers being asked to compete for very small pieces of work. The Procurement Act sets a generous ceiling (£215k for services), so standing orders have full latitude to set thresholds proportionate to the actual scale and risk of the work. Many councils' standing orders were written years ago and benefit from a periodic review against current circumstances.
Do we even need to run a tender — what's the alternative?
Not always. Before reaching for a tender, three questions help test whether one is the right step: do you know broadly what you want done? Do you know roughly what it should cost? Is the expected budget over your threshold? If any of those answers is unclear, the work to do first is clarifying the brief, sounding out suppliers, and sense-checking the budget. Single-source appointments and "best value" routes are entirely legitimate below the thresholds, and a council that's done its homework can often appoint a known good supplier directly.
What does running a tender actually cost — for the council and for suppliers?
More than councils tend to assume on both sides. A clerk often underestimates their own time on the exercise; running a proper tender end-to-end is days of work, not hours. On the supplier side, a small practice will commonly spend **£4–8k preparing a bid for a £40–80k contract**, and a bigger firm spends **£10–12k per bid expecting to win one in ten**. That cost is ultimately baked into every fee a supplier ever quotes. If the work doesn't justify the tender overhead, both sides lose — which is why proportionality matters as much as compliance.
What are the three main routes for finding good suppliers?
**Frameworks** — pre-vetted lists of suppliers maintained by third-party organisations, with the procurement process partly pre-mapped. **Contracts Finder** — the government portal where any public-sector tender can be posted publicly. And a **curated short-list** — assembled by the council, ideally from suppliers it has already met or had recommended. Each has trade-offs, and the right route depends on how much time the council has, what kind of work is being commissioned, and how well known the local supplier base is.
What's the case for and against using a procurement framework?
For: the procurement process is mapped out for you, suppliers are pre-vetted, and the thresholds tend to be more generous than typical council standing orders. Against: the people who sell frameworks operate in a commercially driven space and aren't always neutral about which framework is right for a given project; choosing the wrong framework or panel can quietly cost months. On one large public-sector project, two failed procurement exercises on the wrong panel are known to have eaten four months before the work could properly begin. Frameworks are a useful tool, with trade-offs worth weighing before defaulting to one.
How do you build a "curated short-list" of suppliers?
A lot of the work happens before the tender opens. Meeting local practices, asking other clerks who they've worked with, and treating suppliers as sounding boards in the early stages of a project rather than as competitors at the end all help. A short-list of four to six suppliers the council knows are local, capable, and aligned with the project's values tends to produce stronger bids than a tender broadcast cold to anyone who happens to find it. The supplier relationship begins long before the contract is signed.
How should we structure the tender brief itself?
A useful approach is to layer it from values down to detail. **Core values** of the project come first (what does the council care about?); then **project ambitions** (what success looks like); then **outputs** (deliverables); then **appointments required** (what specialists need to be in the team); then **policy context** (regulations and constraints). Common brief mistakes are the usual ones: too many separate documents, too long, inconsistent deliverables across the pack, ambiguous priorities. A clear, layered brief tends to be the single biggest predictor of a good response from a good supplier.
What scoring scale should we use to evaluate quality on a tender?
A simple five-tier scale — poor, weak, acceptable, good, outstanding (or equivalent words) — works well in practice. The reason for not scoring out of 100 is that percentages tend to make "outstanding" feel mathematically unachievable, with bidders scoring in the 70s and 80s for what's actually excellent work. A five-tier scale forces evaluators to pick a band, which keeps scoring honest and easier to compare across the panel. The aim is for the top category to be one an evaluator might actually award.
Why shouldn't we just pick the cheapest bid?
Lowest-price scoring can quietly skew every other bidder's cost score. If the cheapest bid scores 100% on cost and cost is meaningfully weighted, a single outlier — one bidder going in unrealistically low, by accident or design — can drag the rest of the field into the 60s and 70s on cost. The cheapest bidder may then win even with a weaker quality score, because no other bidder can mathematically catch up. There's a real risk that the council pays less in the line item and significantly more in rework, dispute, or sub-par delivery downstream.
What is "deviation from mean" scoring, and when should we use it?
Instead of giving 100% of the cost score to the cheapest bid, you calculate the average price across all bids and award the highest cost score to the bid closest to that average. The further a bid sits from the mean — too high or too low — the lower its cost score. The logic is that suppliers who understand the work tend to price it within a similar range, while outliers are either being optimistic or haven't fully grasped the project. Deviation from mean is the route most often recommended for council procurements; lowest-price scoring tends to fit better only where the deliverable is genuinely commoditised.
How much weight should cost have in the overall scoring?
On a **construction contract**, no more than around **70%** cost / 30% quality is a commonly recommended ceiling. On a **consultancy or design contract**, weightings as low as **5%** are used, and on some consultancy procurements councils take cost off the scoresheet entirely. The reason is that consultancy outcomes are determined more by judgement, experience and care than by price; the council is effectively choosing a partner rather than a commodity. A common pattern is to publish the budget upfront, take cost off the scoresheet, and use the bids to assess how each supplier would resource the project for the money the council has already said it has.