Early sight of the specification is of course advantageous, but any perceived ‘advantage’ here could be removed by providing all bidders with adequate time to consider the procurement documents and work on their written submissions, once the formal procurement process is commenced. Indeed, we would advocate that as best practice, any documentation produced by the authority and shared with participants of a market engagement exercise should be shared with all bidders (whether or not they participated in the pre-market engagement exercise) along with the rest of the procurement documentation.
It may also be helpful to note that, in our experience, it is becoming more common practice to share draft copies of the procurement documentation (including the specification) as part of the pre-market engagement process. The rationale for this is to ensure that the supplier market is comfortable with the structure of the procurement and the authority’s requirements. The authority is then provided with an opportunity to incorporate any feedback into the final versions of the procurement documents prior to publication. This helps to mitigate against any risk of lack of bidder interest or including selection/evaluation criteria with minimum scoring requirements or “pass/fail” thresholds which could result in inadvertently excluding all/majority of the bidder market.