Quick answer: When the same suppliers win every shortlist, the problem is rarely the market — it's your selection criteria, your qualification thresholds, and the invisible barriers you've built into your process without realising it. This is fixable, but it requires deliberate action before the procurement starts, not during it.
The pattern is more common than anyone admits
I've sat in enough evaluation panels to know the look. Someone lays out the shortlisted suppliers, and three people around the table nod quietly because they expected exactly those names. The same regional contractor. The same national consultancy. The same incumbent wearing a slightly different hat.
It feels like market reality. It isn't. It's process inertia, and it compounds itself every cycle.
Selection criteria are often the real culprit
Most procurement teams treat the Selection Questionnaire as a compliance exercise rather than a strategic tool. The result is a set of thresholds calibrated — consciously or not — to the suppliers who already hold your contracts.
Three years' audited accounts. Turnover at 150% of contract value. Five references of equivalent size and scope. Each requirement sounds reasonable in isolation. Together, they form a wall that smaller, newer, or more specialised suppliers simply cannot climb, regardless of their actual capability to deliver.
Under the Procurement Act 2023, contracting authorities have a clearer obligation to think about market access. The Act's emphasis on transparency and the new notices regime means your selection criteria will face more scrutiny than before. That's a good prompt to revisit them properly.
Turnover thresholds deserve particular attention
The turnover-to-contract-value ratio is one of the most overused and least-examined barriers in public procurement. The instinct behind it is understandable — financial resilience matters. But a blanket multiplier applied without reference to the specific risk profile of a contract is lazy risk management dressed up as due diligence.
A supplier delivering a £400k consultancy engagement doesn't need the same financial headroom as one managing a £400k construction project with material and subcontractor exposure. Disaggregate the risk. Set thresholds that are proportionate to what you're actually buying.
If you're genuinely concerned about financial resilience for smaller suppliers, there are better tools: parent company guarantees, performance bonds, stage payments, phased mobilisation. These protect the authority without excluding the market.
References are a closed loop problem
Asking for references of equivalent value and complexity from a supplier trying to win their first public sector contract of that scale is circular logic. They can't have the experience until someone gives them the work.
This doesn't mean ignoring track record. It means being more sophisticated about how you assess it. Relevant experience in adjacent sectors. Evidence of comparable technical capability at smaller scale. Subcontract experience that demonstrates delivery competence. A well-structured tender evaluation can accommodate all of this without abandoning quality assurance.
Framework agreements compound this problem significantly. If your framework qualification round uses the same blunt criteria, you've locked the market for the duration. Suppliers who weren't ready two years ago, or who've grown since, have no route in until the next round. Dynamic Purchasing Systems exist partly to address this — they're worth considering where the market is genuinely evolving.
Your market engagement isn't reaching the right suppliers
Most pre-market engagement reaches the suppliers already watching your Find a Tender notices. The ones who already know your name. The ones who went to your last supplier day.
If you want different names on the shortlist, you need to reach different parts of the market. That means working with trade associations, sector bodies, and regional business networks. It means talking to your prime contractors about their supply chains and whether there's a disaggregation case. It means being visible at events where your current suppliers aren't the only ones in the room.
The Procurement Act's new Procurement Pipelines requirement — publishing upcoming opportunities in advance — is genuinely useful here. A supplier who has twelve months' notice of an opportunity can prepare a credible bid. One who finds it on the portal with six weeks to go probably can't.
Lotting strategy is an underused lever
A single large contract will attract large suppliers. That's not a law of nature; it's a consequence of how you've structured the opportunity. Where the requirement genuinely allows it, lotting by geography, specialism, or service component opens the door to suppliers who can deliver part of what you need extremely well.
This takes more contract management effort. It's worth being honest about that. But if supplier market diversity is a genuine objective — and under most social value frameworks it should be — lotting is one of the most direct ways to achieve it.
The practical takeaway
Before your next procurement goes live, pull out the selection criteria and ask one question about each threshold: is this proportionate to the actual risk, or is it proportionate to the suppliers we already know? If you can't answer that clearly, the threshold probably needs revisiting. The Procurement Act won't change your shortlists by itself. Your selection criteria will.