The £8bn SCAPE bet councils are about to make

SCAPE published the tender notice for its next construction framework on 25 August 2026. The framework is worth £8bn, covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and will run from September 2027 to September 2031 with the option of two further years. The current framework appoints one delivery partner per lot. The new one, designed under the Procurement Act 2023, appoints three delivery partners to each of five lots. The obvious reading is that three partners means more choice and more choice means lower prices. SCAPE says the redesign answers market feedback and a changed legislative environment. That may be right. However, that holds only under one condition, and the framework's own rules lean against it. I have spent my working life on the supplier side of this equation. The cost of standing ready is real. A delivery partner on a framework of this size maintains a bid team, a governance and assurance structure, and the management overhead of a tier-one contractor. Under SCAPE's current direct-award model, built around single partners, each firm carried that cost expecting to recover it through the work it won. The model was criticised for concentration, but no firms were paying to stand ready for nothing. With three partners, three firms carry that capability. It is a fixed cost. It does not fall when a firm wins less, and it has to be recovered from somewhere. This means two outcomes could follow.In the first, one firm in each lot wins most of the work, and two firms have held, for four years or more, capability that produced little revenue. That cost is deadweight, and all three firms will price it in next time. Councils pay more, for a choice they held but did not exercise.Why, then, would a contractor bid for a place that may return nothing? Because UK public construction is concentrated in frameworks, and declining to bid is an exit from the market rather than a commercial choice. In the second, work divides in roughly equal thirds. The process still costs more, but three firms that genuinely expect to win compete on price at the point where price is set, and that pressure can exceed the added process cost. This is what the framework is designed to produce. Its precondition: each firm must be capable of holding the lot alone. If one or two are appointed to make a lot look competitive rather than to compete, what the trade calls column fodder, councils get the first outcome with the second outcome's process cost on top. The mechanics matter here. As it stands, above threshold, a council can award without further competition through an automated model driven by the scores partners submit at the 2027 tender. The council picks a primary criterion: balanced, quality-led, price-led or performance-led. Three of the four send the job to whichever partner scored highest in that original 2027 procurement. Only the performance route uses delivered work, and it is unavailable in the first year. Left on its defaults, the mechanism concentrates work on one firm. The second outcome requires councils to choose against the default, job by job, for up to six years.Price, meanwhile, is locked. Below £50m, the notice says a council running a competitive selection may not request fee proposals; it may only review the commercial model tendered at framework stage. Most public building work sits below £50m, so whatever pressure three partners exert on price, they exert once, in 2027, and it holds for the life of the framework. Why, then, would a contractor bid for a place that may return nothing? Because UK public construction is concentrated in frameworks, and declining to bid is an exit from the market rather than a commercial choice. The design change may prove right. However, the case for it won't be settled until the framework has run. The test can only be applied in retrospect: what was the allocation of work? Evenly and fairly distributed? Competition did its job and the public sector is better off. Concentrated on one partner? The public sector paid to keep three firms ready, bought from one, and met the cost of the other two in the price. Laurie Nicol is an economist and the founder of Tendl, a tendering technology company. He writes The Venture Economist

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PROCUREMENT

The £8bn SCAPE bet councils are about to make

By Laurie Nicol | 14 September 2026

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