Construction PQQ Guide: PAS 91, the Common Assessment Standard, and How to Answer Faster

A pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) is the first stage of a construction tender, where a buyer checks whether your business is financially sound, legally compliant, competent, and safe enough to be invited to price the job. It is a pass or fail gate, not a competition on price. PAS 91 was the UK's standardised PQQ for construction, but it was formally withdrawn by BSI in 2022 and replaced in practice by Build UK's Common Assessment Standard, which most major UK buyers now use.

This guide explains what a PQQ actually asks for, what changed when PAS 91 went, how the Common Assessment Standard works, and how to build a reusable answer library so that the next PQQ takes hours instead of days. If you want the prompt straight away, jump to the draft pre-qualification questionnaire workflow.

What a PQQ is, and why it exists

Buyers do not want to evaluate detailed prices from twenty contractors, half of whom might be uninsured, financially fragile, or have a poor safety record. So procurement is split into two stages.

The pre-qualification stage asks: can this company do this work at all, and is it safe to contract with them? It looks backwards at your accounts, your insurance, your accreditations, your health and safety record, and your past projects.

The tender or ITT stage asks: what would you charge, and how would you deliver it? Only companies that pass pre-qualification get to this point.

That distinction matters, because it tells you how to write a PQQ answer. Pre-qualification is not the place for persuasion, differentiation, or a sales pitch. It is a compliance exercise. Every question has an evidence requirement behind it, and the fastest route to a pass is to answer precisely what was asked, attach the document that proves it, and stop writing.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, which took effect in February 2025, public sector buyers now run a Central Digital Platform supplier registration and use "conditions of participation" rather than the old standard selection questionnaire language. But the substance is unchanged: a screening stage on capability and standing, then an award stage on the offer itself. Private sector buyers, framework operators, and main contractors screening subcontractors continue to use PQQs by that name.

What happened to PAS 91

PAS 91 (full name: PAS 91:2013+A1:2017, "Construction prequalification questionnaires") was a publicly available specification published by BSI. Its purpose was to end the madness of every buyer inventing their own PQQ, by giving the industry one common set of pre-qualification questions.

It worked reasonably well, but it was never mandatory, and buyers kept bolting their own supplementary questions onto it. In 2022 BSI withdrew PAS 91 and did not replace it. The Construction Leadership Council and Build UK had by then backed a different answer: the Common Assessment Standard.

So if you see a tender still asking for "PAS 91 compliance" in 2026, one of three things is true. The buyer is using an old template and has not updated it. They mean "a standard PQQ" generically. Or they are a smaller organisation that still runs the legacy question set because it is familiar. None of these are a problem for you. The questions PAS 91 asked are almost entirely the same questions the Common Assessment Standard asks, so a good answer library covers both.

PAS 91 vs the Common Assessment Standard vs a bespoke PQQ

The critical practical difference is the middle row. PAS 91 and bespoke PQQs are filled in again for every single opportunity. The Common Assessment Standard is assessed once, and the certificate is then accepted by every buyer who recognises it. If you tender regularly, that is the single biggest time saving available to you in pre-qualification, and it is worth the assessment fee within about three tenders.

Assessment bodies recognised for the Common Assessment Standard include CHAS, Constructionline, Achilles Building Confidence, and others. They all assess against the same question set, so the certificate is portable regardless of which body issued it.

What a construction PQQ actually asks for

Whatever the format, PQQs cluster into the same eight areas. Knowing the clusters is what lets you build a reusable library.

1. Company identity and structure

Registered name, company number, registered address, trading addresses, VAT number, legal form, parent company, and any recent changes of name or ownership. Trivial to answer, and trivial to get wrong if someone types the trading name where the registered name was asked for.

2. Financial standing

Two or three years of filed accounts, turnover figures, a credit reference, and confirmation that you are not in insolvency proceedings. Many buyers apply a turnover ratio test, typically that the contract value should not exceed 25 to 50 percent of your annual turnover. If the job is too big for your balance sheet, they will fail you here regardless of how good your safety record is.

3. Health and safety

The heaviest section, and the one most often failed. Buyers want your written health and safety policy signed and dated within the last twelve months, your competent H&S advisor's details, your RIDDOR reportable incident history (usually three years), your accident frequency rate, any HSE enforcement notices or prosecutions, and evidence of your risk assessment and method statement process. See our RAMS templates and the construction method statement guide for the underlying documents these questions probe.

Under CDM 2015, the client and principal designer have a legal duty to check that anyone they appoint has the skills, knowledge, experience, and (for organisations) the organisational capability to fulfil their role. Regulation 8 is the reason your PQQ asks all of this. When a buyer asks how you discharge your CDM duties, they are checking that you know which duty holder you are on their project and what that entails.

4. Equality, diversity, and legal compliance

Equality policy, modern slavery statement (mandatory if turnover exceeds £36m under the Modern Slavery Act 2015), anti-bribery policy, data protection compliance, and confirmation of no unspent convictions for the relevant offences.

5. Environmental management

Environmental policy, ISO 14001 certification if held, waste management arrangements, and increasingly a carbon reduction plan. For central government contracts over £5m per annum, PPN 06/21 requires a published carbon reduction plan committing to net zero by 2050.

6. Quality management

ISO 9001 certification if held, or a description of your quality management system. Your defects and snagging process usually appears here, which is where a documented snagging process earns its keep.

7. Insurance

Employer's liability (minimum £5m by law, most buyers want £10m), public liability, contractors all risks, and professional indemnity if you carry any design responsibility. This is the fastest section to fail on a technicality, because the certificate must be in date on the day of submission and the named insured must exactly match your registered entity.

8. Technical capability and references

Two or three case studies of comparable projects, with client names, contract values, dates, and referee contact details. Buyers do call referees. The most common self-inflicted wound here is submitting a case study that is not comparable in value, sector, or procurement route.

A worked example: a groundworks subcontractor's PQQ

Consider Hartley Groundworks Ltd, a Yorkshire subcontractor with £4.2m turnover and 28 staff. They are invited to pre-qualify for a groundworks package on a £14m residential scheme for a regional main contractor. The package is worth £1.6m.

Here is how the PQQ actually plays out.

Financial. The main contractor's threshold is that no package should exceed 40 percent of the subcontractor's turnover. £1.6m against £4.2m is 38 percent. Hartley passes, but narrowly, and their answer should proactively address it: current order book, available facilities, and the fact that the package is phased over 14 months so the peak monthly exposure is modest. Saying nothing here invites the buyer to draw their own conclusion.

Health and safety. Hartley had one RIDDOR reportable incident 20 months ago: an operative fractured a wrist stepping into an unmarked service trench. Concealing it is not an option, because the HSE record is public and a discovered omission is an automatic fail on honesty grounds. The correct answer states the incident factually, then describes what changed: revised permit-to-dig procedure, mandatory GPR survey before any excavation, and a supervisor sign-off gate added to the excavation method statement. Buyers do not expect a zero-incident history from a groundworks contractor. They expect evidence that you learn.

Technical capability. Their three strongest case studies by value are all commercial, not residential. The residential job they should cite is smaller (£900k) but matches the sector, the ground conditions, and the main contractor's own procurement route. Sector match beats headline value almost every time at pre-qualification.

Insurance. Their public liability certificate expires 11 days after the submission deadline. Technically valid. In practice, they should attach both the current certificate and the broker's written confirmation of renewal terms, because an evaluator with a scoring matrix in front of them will mark an about-to-expire certificate down and will not ring you to ask.

Time cost. Hartley's commercial manager historically spent about two working days on a PQQ of this size, most of it rewriting answers he had already written for a different buyer six weeks earlier. That is the problem worth solving.

Build an answer library once, reuse it forever

The single most valuable thing a contractor can do about PQQs is stop treating each one as a writing task. Roughly 80 percent of every PQQ is the same eight clusters above, phrased slightly differently.

Build a master document containing, for each cluster:

• The canonical answer, written well, at full length.
• A short version for word-limited fields.
• The evidence file that goes with it, with an owner and an expiry date.
• The date last reviewed, so stale answers get caught.

Then treat each new PQQ as a mapping exercise: read the question, find the cluster, paste the canonical answer, tailor the two or three sentences that genuinely depend on this buyer or this project, and attach the evidence.

Keep an evidence expiry register alongside it. Insurance certificates, H&S policy review dates, ISO certificates, and accreditation renewals all expire, and an expired document in the pack is the cheapest possible way to fail.

How AI turns a two-day PQQ into a two-hour one

AI is well suited to PQQ work because the task is structured, repetitive, and evidence-bound rather than creative. It is not well suited to inventing facts, and you must never let it.

The workflow that works:

1. Load your answer library and your company facts into the AI as context. Turnover, headcount, accreditations, incident history, insurance limits, case studies.
2. Paste the buyer's actual questions. Not a summary of them, the real text, including word limits.
3. Ask the AI to map each question to your library answer and flag any question your library does not cover. That gap list is the real output on a first pass.
4. Ask it to draft the tailored answers, staying inside word limits, referencing the specific evidence file for each, and using the buyer's own terminology.
5. Review every factual claim. Every number, date, project name, and certificate reference gets checked against source. This step is not optional. A hallucinated turnover figure or an invented case study in a pre-qualification submission is a fraud risk, not a typo.
6. Ask the AI to review the completed pack as a hostile evaluator, scoring each answer against the published criteria and identifying which would fail. This is the highest-value prompt in the whole workflow and almost nobody runs it.

Step 6 is where AI genuinely outperforms a tired commercial manager reading his own writing at 7pm. A model given the buyer's scoring matrix will reliably spot that question 4.3 asked for "three years" of data and you supplied two, or that your environmental answer described a policy without ever stating who is accountable for it.

Our draft pre-qualification questionnaire workflow contains the exact prompts for each step. The wider prompt set, including tender and bid prompts, is in the BuildCopilot Prompt Pack. Because PQQ packs involve long documents and attachments, Claude tends to handle the context better than shorter-window tools.

Once you pass pre-qualification, the same discipline applies to the tender itself. Our AI tender analysis guide covers evaluating and responding to the ITT stage, and the tender analysis collection has the role-specific prompts.

The five things that fail a PQQ

• An expired or mismatched insurance certificate. In date on the submission date, and the named insured must exactly match the registered entity that is tendering.
• An undated or unsigned health and safety policy. It must be signed by a director and reviewed within the last twelve months. An undated policy reads as a policy nobody has looked at.
• A concealed incident or enforcement notice. Disclose it and describe the corrective action. Concealment converts a survivable safety record into a disqualifying integrity failure.
• Non-comparable references. A £10m commercial fit-out does not evidence competence on a £1.6m residential groundworks package. Match the sector and the procurement route before you match the value.
• Answering a question that was not asked. Word-limited fields punish preamble. Answer the question in the first sentence, evidence it in the second, and stop.

Where to start this week

If you tender more than about four times a year, get assessed against the Common Assessment Standard. It removes the largest single source of duplicated effort in UK construction pre-qualification, and the certificate travels with you.

If you tender less often, build the answer library anyway. Two days spent writing eight canonical answers and assembling the evidence pack pays for itself on the second PQQ, and it means the next opportunity that lands on a Friday with a Tuesday deadline is a mapping exercise rather than a weekend.

Either way, the CDM 2015 competence questions, the construction phase plan, and the RAMS documentation sit underneath everything a buyer will ask you. Get those right and the PQQ is mostly a matter of finding the file.

Frequently asked questions

What is a PQQ in construction?

A PQQ, or pre-qualification questionnaire, is the screening stage of a construction tender. The buyer assesses whether your company is financially sound, adequately insured, legally compliant, and competent in health, safety, environment, and quality before inviting you to price the work. It is assessed on a pass or fail basis, not on price.

Is PAS 91 still used?

No, not formally. BSI withdrew PAS 91:2013+A1:2017 in 2022 and did not replace it. Build UK's Common Assessment Standard is now the recognised UK pre-qualification standard. Some buyers still refer to "PAS 91" out of habit or use legacy templates, but the questions are substantially the same, so a good answer library covers both.

What is the Common Assessment Standard?

The Common Assessment Standard is a single, industry-agreed pre-qualification question set backed by Build UK and the Construction Leadership Council. You are assessed once by a recognised assessment body such as CHAS, Constructionline, or Achilles, and the resulting certificate is accepted by every buyer who recognises the standard, rather than completing a fresh PQQ for each one. Certificates are valid for twelve months.

How long does a PQQ take to complete?

A first-time bespoke PQQ typically takes one to three working days of a commercial manager's time. With a maintained answer library the same PQQ takes two to four hours, and with a Common Assessment Standard certificate many buyers waive the questionnaire entirely.

What is the difference between a PQQ and an ITT?

A PQQ screens whether you are capable and safe to contract with, looking backwards at your accounts, insurance, safety record, and past projects. An ITT (invitation to tender) asks what you would charge and how you would deliver the specific project. Only companies that pass pre-qualification receive the ITT.

Can AI write my PQQ answers?

AI can draft, tailor, and quality-check PQQ answers very effectively when you give it your real company facts and your existing answer library as context. It must never be allowed to generate facts. Every figure, date, project reference, and certificate number needs verifying against source before submission, because an invented claim in a pre-qualification submission is a serious integrity failure rather than a simple error.

Does CDM 2015 require a PQQ?

CDM 2015 does not mandate a questionnaire, but Regulation 8 requires clients and duty holders to satisfy themselves that anyone they appoint has the necessary skills, knowledge, experience, and organisational capability. In practice a PQQ is the standard way that duty is discharged and evidenced, which is why the health and safety competence questions are the heaviest section of most questionnaires.