"Preference will be given to Applicant[s]..that will commit to deliver at least one regular and advertised Drop-in Service Session per week available to Immigration clients from the Office.." and the Scoring System note against that said: "
"5. A Regular Drop-in Session per week"
"11.2 Submission of a tender which fails to comply with any Terms and Conditions of Tender, User Agreement or other rules, conditions of contract award and instructions shall, without affecting the Applicant Organisation's liability for non compliance, entitle the LSC to reject a tender, assess the tender as unsuccessful and/or entitle the LSC not to proceed with any decision made to award the Applicant Organisation a Contract or entitle the LSC to terminate the contract pursuant to Clause 25 of the Standard Terms. 11.6 It is the responsibility of Applicant Organisations to make sure that their tenders are fully and accurately completed and accompanied by the appropriate documents. We are under no obligation to contact Applicant Organisations to clarify their tenders or to obtain missing information or documents, and tenders which are incomplete may not be considered. It is Applicant Organisations' responsibility to obtain at their own expense all additional information necessary for the preparation of their tender. 11.8 We may request Applicant Organisations to give additional information/clarification at any time during the tender process. Applicant Organisations should be prepared to provide additional information and/or clarify any aspects of their tender with us. We reserve the right to validate any part of your tender and information subsequently given to us. 11.20 Applicant Organisations may amend and re-submit their response to the PQQ and/or each ITT at any time up to the closing time and date. If so amended and re-submitted by the Applicant Organisation it is understood that the last response submitted by an Applicant Organisation prior to the closing time and date shall be the response that is considered by the LSC in the evaluation and award process. 11.23 Applicant Organisation must not amend or alter any document comprising part of their tender after the closing time and date set out in paragraph 11.2."
"10.19 There will be a right of appeal against a decision by us not to award a 2010 Standard Civil Contract or to reject your application if it is incomplete. 10.20 The right of appeal applies in the following circumstances:... (c) Where the Applicant Organisation's Individual Bid ranks lower than those of other Applicant Organisations on the Selection Criteria and is subsequently not awarded a contract."
"I consider that the tender rules...are very clear that it is the Applicants responsibility to submit an accurate tender. The LSC is entitled to assess tenders on the basis of the information directly provided by the Applicant. I consider that allowing the Applicant to amend its tender response at this stage would be allowing it to improve its tender, and in the context of the Selection Criteria stage of a competitive tender process, would not be fair on other Applicants."
"A contracting authority shall (in accordance with Article 2 of the Public Sector Directive)— (a) treat economic operators equally and in a non-discriminatory way; and (b) act in a transparent way." 19. Paragraph 47 provides as follows: "(1) The obligation on – (a) a contracting authority to comply with the provisions of these Regulations … and with any enforceable Community obligation in respect of a public contract … is a duty owed to an economic operator... (6) A breach of the duty … is actionable by any economic operator which, in consequence, suffers, or risks suffering, loss or damage and those proceedings shall be brought in the High Court."
"would the tenderer commit to offering it?"
"..although there is no element of potential abuse on the facts of this case, given the objectively verifiable nature of the mistake, if mistakes are allowed to be corrected after the deadline which are not evidence on the face of the tender, that would give rise to the risk of tenderers having second thoughts, and portraying their original thoughts as erroneously recorded when there was in truth a change of position."
"Although paragraph 11.8 of the defendant's IFA gave it the right to seek additional information/clarification, I conclude that Tideland cannot assist the claimant in the present because: i) There was no ambiguity in the bid, simply an uncompleted section of the form. Although some parts of the data required to score points might have been culled from information provided elsewhere in the bid, not all of the information that the claimant needed to supply to gain 51 points could have been so derived. The LSC could have identified that the claimant's firm was a qualified solicitor's practice based at an address in Bristol, but other information it had supplied elsewhere was subtly distinct from the questions asked in the selection criteria part of the form. The provision of information relevant to the selection criteria and the non-completion of that part of the application form, did not constitute an ambiguity that the defendant was bound to inquire into. ii) The exercise of the power of inquiry did not arise in circumstances where the imprecision of the tender terms or the defendant's subsequent conduct required it to exercise the power. The defendant had not caused the claimant's failure to provide the relevant material. iii) An overbroad exercise of the power to seek clarification would be contrary to the principle of equality and fair treatment of all tenderers. The CFI acknowledges this limit at [38] in Tideland and a similar emphasis has been attached to this principle in the decision of David Richards J in Leadbitter... approved by the Court of Appeal in Azam.. iv) It would be unfair to rival tenderers for the defendant either to have allowed the claimant to amend its application by completing it, or to fill in the selection criteria on behalf of the claimant from information that might have been available to it extraneously. Paragraph 11.6 of the IFA makes clear it is the responsibility of applicants to make sure all tenders are fully and accurately completed and there is no obligation on the defendant to obtain missing information or documents. Paragraph 11.7 explains that information already provided to the LSC in a previous contract could not be used to populate the PQQ and ITT "to ensure that we can assess each tender in a fair, like for like and reasonable manner"
"Viewed entirely from the point of view of a public law duty to act fairly, it may well be that the exercise of a discretion to grant a benefit should be based on all matters that could or should be known to the authority, and that fairness might well include a reasonable opportunity to correct obvious errors without changing the fundamental nature of the bid submitted. It is after all in the public interest that a well-qualified and experienced provider of legal services in the field of immigration should be permitted to continue in business. However, any such duty is severely circumscribed where there is a competitive tender and an over-riding duty to treat all tenderers equally. Here for reasons that were not the responsibility of the defendant, the claimant had failed to supply the information that would have lead them to being ranked in priority where there was competition for the award of [new matter starts]...Any general duty to give an applicant an opportunity to correct errors in the absence of fault by the defendant, yields to the duty to apply the rules of the competition consistently and fairly between all applicants, and not afford an individual applicant an opportunity to amend the bid and improve its prospects of success in the competition after the submission date had passed."
"Regrettably, as I have found, the mistake here was that of AAR and AAR alone. Under the terms of the Information for Applicants, it was obliged to gets its completed forms in before the deadline and failed to do so. There can be no good reason, under the principles of equality of treatment or proportionality, for permitting it to put in a complete TIF – for that is what the additional information would in reality amount to even if some aspects could be gleaned elsewhere from the PQQ or ITT -after the deadline. Indeed to do so would run counter to the whole tender process and would be unjust to other tenderers, bound by the same terms and who had made no such mistake."