Sorry, but I think there's a difference between inviting agencies to pitch and putting something out to tender. A tender is an open competition where you must advertise the opportunity and have no control over who responds. A pitch is where you invite a selected number of agencies to compete and have complete control over which (and how many) agencies you invite. As a public body, and with a budget over £10k, I would think that the Council was required to put this out to tender. They would have had no control over the number of responses that they would have received, so it may be that 114 agencies were competing - that is the nature of tenders. However, if Stirling Council put 114 agencies through the Pre Qualification Questionnaire stage and Invited them to Tender, that is crazy as it is best procurement practice to whittle the number invited to tender down to a manageable number - and they usually state what this number is at the start of the process. Can anyone clarify what happened?
Sorry, but I think there's a difference between inviting agencies to pitch and putting something out to tender. A tender is an open competition where you must advertise the opportunity and have no control over who responds. A pitch is where you invite a selected number of agencies to compete and have complete control over which (and how many) agencies you invite. As a public body, and with a budget over £10k, I would think that the Council was required to put this out to tender. They would have had no control over the number of responses that they would have received, so it may be that 114 agencies were competing - that is the nature of tenders. However, if Stirling Council put 114 agencies through the Pre Qualification Questionnaire stage and Invited them to Tender, that is crazy as it is best procurement practice to whittle the number invited to tender down to a manageable number - and they usually state what this number is at the start of the process. Can anyone clarify what happened?