Draft a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire

This workflow drafts a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire: the document you send to subcontractors and suppliers before you let them anywhere near a tender list. A PQQ answers one question. Can this firm actually do this work, and will they still be trading when it completes? Most PQQs in circulation are somebody's old one with the dates changed. They ask for three years of accounts and never read them, demand ISO 9001 from a two-man groundworks outfit that will never have it, and score everyone at 70 percent because nobody agreed what the scoring meant. The output is a filing exercise that filters nothing. The prompt produces a structured questionnaire across the standard areas: company information, financial standing, experience, resources, health and safety, quality, environmental, insurance, and the declarations. Aligned to PAS 91 where that is useful. WHEN TO USE THIS Use it when you are setting up a supply chain from scratch, or opening a new trade you have not bought before. Use it for framework prequalification, where you are building a list you will draw from for two or three years and the quality of that list determines a lot of your delivery risk. Use it when your existing PQQ is old. Anything drafted before the Building Safety Act 2022 will not ask the right competence questions for higher-risk buildings, and anything drafted before 2015 predates CDM 2015 duties entirely. Use it when you have been burned. The honest trigger for most PQQ reviews is a subcontractor going under mid-package, and the question afterwards is always whether the warning signs were in the return and nobody looked. WHEN NOT TO USE THIS Do not send a full PQQ for a small package. A £15,000 job does not warrant a 40-question document, and sending one to a good local firm is a fast way to get no return at all. Small trades bin PQQs. Ask for insurances, accreditations, two references and proof they have done it before. Do not use it where a recognised scheme already does the job. If a firm holds SSIP membership through CHAS, SafeContractor or SMAS, that is the point of the scheme: accept the certificate and stop re-asking the health and safety questions. Making a firm answer 30 H&S questions they have already answered for SSIP is exactly the duplication PAS 91 was written to reduce. Do not use a PQQ to do a tender's job. Prequalification asks whether they are capable. It does not ask what they will charge or how they will build it. Questions about programme, method and price belong in the ITT, and asking them at PQQ stage means you are evaluating a bid from firms you have not yet qualified. And do not use a generic PQQ on higher-risk buildings. Under the Building Safety Act regime, competence assessment for work on higher-risk buildings is a specific duty with specific requirements, and a general capability questionnaire does not discharge it. Get that one right with advice rather than a template. COMMON MISTAKES Asking for information you will not read. Every question costs the respondent time and costs you assessment time. If three years of full accounts arrive and nobody in your business will open them, ask instead for the two or three ratios you actually care about. A PQQ nobody assesses is worse than no PQQ, because it creates a record suggesting you checked. Setting thresholds that exclude the firms you want. A minimum £5m turnover on a £200,000 package rules out most specialist subcontractors, who are frequently the best ones. The usual rule of thumb is that your package should not exceed roughly 20 to 25 percent of a subcontractor's annual turnover, and that is a guide rather than a rule. Set the threshold from the package, not from a template. No scoring methodology. If you have not decided before issue what a good answer looks like, you will score on impression. Write the scoring guidance at the same time as the questions, and if two people are assessing, have them score independently before comparing. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Is PAS 91 still current? PAS 91:2013+A1:2017 is the standard set of prequalification questions for UK construction, and it was withdrawn by BSI in 2022 rather than replaced. That leaves an awkward position: it is no longer maintained, but it is still widely referenced and its structure is still the common language of prequalification, particularly through SSIP schemes that were built around it. Treat it as a sensible structure rather than a live standard, and be aware that on public work the Procurement Act 2023 regime governs, and on higher-risk buildings the Building Safety Act competence requirements apply on top. What financial checks should a PQQ actually include? Turnover and profit for three years, so you can see the trend rather than one year. A credit reference, since a deteriorating score is a much earlier warning than filed accounts. Confirmation that accounts are filed on time, because late filing is a genuine red flag. Any CCJs, winding-up petitions or insolvency proceedings. And the ratio that matters most: your package value against their annual turnover. A subcontractor taking on a job worth 60 percent of their turnover is a risk regardless of how healthy the accounts look. Can AI assess the returns as well as draft the questionnaire? It can help enormously with the reading and not at all with the deciding. Give it ten returns and ask it to build a comparison table of accreditations held, turnover, incident rates and gaps, and it will save you a day. What it cannot do is judge whether a firm with one poor year and a good explanation is a better bet than a firm with flat numbers and no explanation. That is a commercial judgement, and if a firm is excluded on the back of it you need a human who can say why. How long should a PQQ be? As short as your risk allows. A useful discipline: for every question, name who reads the answer and what decision it changes. Questions that fail that test get cut. Most PQQs could lose a third of their content and filter just as well, and a shorter one gets better returns from the firms you actually want. How often should prequalification be refreshed? Annually for financial and insurance information, since both go stale fast and both are how you catch a firm in trouble. Accreditations get checked at their expiry dates. Experience and capacity only need revisiting when something changes, such as a firm losing key staff or moving into a sector they have not worked in. The failure mode is a framework list qualified in year one and never revisited, where by year three you are drawing from a list that describes companies as they were.

Use when you need a prequalification questionnaire for a new trade, a framework, or a supply chain refresh, and you want a complete structure rather than last year's document with the dates changed. Give it the trade, the package value range, and any mandatory requirements such as SSIP membership or sector accreditations. Set the turnover threshold from your package value rather than accepting a round number, since the usual guide is that a package should not exceed roughly 20 to 25 percent of a subcontractor's annual turnover. Then add the two or three trade-specific questions the AI will not know to ask. On groundworks that is temporary works and excavation. On roofing it is working at height and edge protection. On M&E it is commissioning and competency. Those questions are what turn a generic document into something that actually filters.