WHO ACTUALLY WINS? FRAMEWORK AWARDS, CONCENTRATION, AND THE LONG TAIL

The distinction between appointment and award

Framework appointment is not contract award. This is the most important distinction in framework procurement and the one most frequently obscured by the language the market uses.

When a framework body announces that 40 suppliers have been appointed to its FM framework, the market reads that as 40 firms competing for work. The buyer sees a competitive panel. The supplier sees a pipeline. The framework body reports a diverse, multi supplier agreement.

What the appointment announcement does not tell you is how the work will be distributed. Appointment determines who is eligible to compete. It does not determine who will win. And the distribution of actual call off awards across a 40 supplier panel is rarely even. In most frameworks, it is heavily concentrated.

Framework appointment is the right to compete. It is not the right to win. The gap between those two things is where the concentration problem lives.

The concentration pattern

Baachu Rain tracks over 11,000 UK FM contracts. The dataset includes call off awards through CCS frameworks, NHS SBS, regional frameworks, and direct tenders. When the framework call off data is analysed by supplier, a consistent pattern emerges across frameworks, sectors, and time periods.

The top 10 capture the majority

On the major national FM frameworks, the top 10 suppliers by call off value typically account for 60 to 80% of the total framework spend. The remaining suppliers, often 20 to 30 firms, share the remaining 20 to 40%. Some appointed suppliers receive no call offs at all during the framework term.

This is not unique to FM. Concentration patterns appear across public sector procurement in professional services, construction, IT, and other categories. But in FM, the concentration is reinforced by factors specific to the sector: the incumbent advantage on re tenders, the TUPE transfer complexity that favours existing providers, the client relationship that develops over multi year contracts, and the risk aversion of buyers who default to known operators.

The long tail

The suppliers at the bottom of the framework panel, those appointed but winning little or no work, are the long tail. They invested in the framework bid. They met the financial viability thresholds. They passed the quality evaluation. They were appointed. And then nothing happened.

For these suppliers, the framework delivered access without opportunity. They paid the cost of entry, which as Article 2 documented can run to £30,000 to £70,000 per framework submission, and received no return. The framework body can point to their presence on the panel as evidence of supplier diversity. The supplier cannot point to any revenue.

The long tail exists because frameworks are designed to maximise the number of qualified suppliers at appointment. The more suppliers on the panel, the more competitive the framework appears. But the call off mechanism, particularly direct award, concentrates the actual work in a much smaller group. The panel is wide. The awards are narrow. The long tail is the gap between the two.

The long tail exists to legitimise the framework, not to win work. A framework with 40 suppliers looks competitive. A framework where 8 of those 40 win 75% of the value is a shortlist with extra steps.

Why the same names keep winning

The concentration pattern is not random. It is produced by structural factors in the framework and call off process that systematically favour certain types of supplier.

The incumbent advantage

When a public sector estate re tenders its FM contract through a framework call off, the incumbent provider has advantages that no challenger can replicate. The incumbent knows the estate. The incumbent holds the TUPE workforce. The incumbent has the maintenance history, the asset data, and the client relationship. A challenger bidding through a mini competition must price a contract they have never operated on an estate they have not surveyed with a workforce they have not met. The incumbent bids from knowledge. The challenger bids from assumption.

The PFI Reckoning series examines a specific version of this dynamic. When PFI contracts expire, the incumbent FM provider has operated the estate for 25 to 30 years. The knowledge asymmetry between incumbent and challenger is so severe that genuine competition at re tender is structurally unlikely without an extended pre procurement phase that most authorities do not resource.

The TUPE transfer cost

FM contracts carry workforces. When a contract transfers to a new provider, the TUPE regulations require the new provider to take on the existing workforce on their existing terms. For large contracts with complex TUPE populations, including pension obligations, legacy terms, and pay structures that differ from the new provider’s standard model, the TUPE transfer cost can make a competitive bid uneconomic. Incumbents do not face TUPE transfer costs on re tender because they already employ the workforce. This gives them a structural pricing advantage that the framework evaluation does not adjust for.

The PFI Reckoning Article 8 covers TUPE, pensions, and the human cost of contract transition in detail, including Fair Deal pension obligations and the Employee Liability Information requirements that are frequently mishandled during framework call offs.

Direct award as a concentration accelerator

Article 2 described the direct award mechanism: the buyer selects a supplier from the framework panel without running a mini competition. Direct award is faster and simpler. It is also the primary mechanism through which spend concentrates. When buyers use direct award, they select from familiarity: the supplier they know, the supplier they have used before, the supplier whose name they recognise. Direct award does not reward the best bid. It rewards the strongest relationship and the lowest perceived risk.

On frameworks where direct award accounts for a significant proportion of call offs, the concentration effect is amplified. The same suppliers are selected repeatedly. The long tail suppliers are never considered. The framework delivers compliance without competition.

The bid factory advantage

Large FM providers maintain dedicated bid teams: full time writers, commercial analysts, pricing specialists, and technical authors who produce framework submissions and call off responses at volume. A Tier 1 FM provider can respond to a mini competition in days with a polished, scored, and commercially optimised submission. A mid market or specialist supplier may not have a dedicated bid function at all. The owner or operations director writes the response alongside their day job.

The framework evaluation does not measure who can deliver the best service. It measures who can produce the best submission. These are correlated but they are not the same thing. The bid factory advantage means that the quality of the submission often reflects the quality of the bid team, not the quality of the operational delivery.

What the data shows by sector

The concentration pattern varies by sector, but the direction is consistent.

Central government

CCS frameworks serving central government departments show the strongest concentration. Mandated framework usage combined with direct award convenience creates a small group of providers who hold the majority of government estate FM contracts. The names are predictable: Mitie, ISS, Serco, Sodexo, EMCOR, Equans, Vinci, OCS, CBRE. These are not bad operators. They are capable, experienced, and scalable. The question is not whether they can deliver. The question is whether the framework produces genuine competition or simply validates a shortlist the market already knows.

NHS

NHS SBS frameworks show concentration in Soft FM services, particularly cleaning and catering, where a small number of national providers dominate call off awards. The clinical environment creates additional barriers to entry: infection control compliance, clinical waste handling, and NHS specific governance requirements reduce the pool of credible bidders. The ERIC Reckoning series examines how NHS estate data drives procurement decisions and why the data quality limitations in ERIC affect the accuracy of the specifications that framework call offs are priced against.

Education

Education FM frameworks show a different pattern. The fragmentation of the education estate across academies, multi academy trusts, maintained schools, and further education colleges means that no single framework dominates. But within individual frameworks, the same concentration appears: a small number of providers win most of the call off value. The difference is that the total value per framework is smaller, which means the concentration has less market impact but the same structural cause.

Local government

Regional frameworks operated by ESPO, YPO, and Pagabo show more variation. Regional suppliers can and do win call offs in their home geography. But the pattern still holds on a regional basis: within each framework, a small number of suppliers capture the majority of call off value. The regional frameworks are more accessible to mid market suppliers than the national CCS frameworks, but they are not immune to concentration.

The competition question

Frameworks are justified on the basis that they provide competition within a pre qualified pool. The concentration data challenges that justification.

If 60 to 80% of framework spend concentrates in the top 10 suppliers, the remaining 20 to 30 suppliers on the panel are not competing effectively. They are present but not winning. The framework provides the appearance of competition, a published panel of 40 suppliers, without delivering the reality: a distribution of work that reflects genuine competitive pressure.

This does not mean the top 10 are winning unfairly. They may be winning because they are the best operators, the best priced, or the best placed geographically. But the concentration raises a structural question: if the same firms win regardless of the framework, regardless of the evaluation criteria, and regardless of the lot structure, what is the framework adding? Is it creating competition or curating a shortlist?

An open tender for each requirement would produce a different competitive dynamic. It would allow suppliers not on the framework to compete. It would force buyers to evaluate against the specific requirement rather than relying on a generic framework appointment. It would remove the incumbent advantage that framework re appointments create. It would cost more in procurement time and resource. But it might produce better outcomes.

Article 5 of this series examines the evaluation mechanism in detail: how scoring models at both framework and call off level produce predictable outcomes that reinforce the concentration pattern described here.

The data does not lie

Framework appointment lists create an impression of competitive breadth. Call off award data reveals a different reality. The concentration is consistent, structural, and largely unexamined by the organisations that operate the frameworks.

This article has described the pattern without attributing it to bad faith. The suppliers who win most often are often the most capable. The buyers who select them often have good reasons. The framework bodies that publish 40 supplier panels are not misleading anyone deliberately. But the gap between the published panel and the actual distribution of work is wide enough to warrant scrutiny.

The next article examines the machinery that produces these outcomes: the evaluation model. How quality is scored. How price is weighted. Why certain types of supplier consistently score higher than others. And whether the scoring mechanism is measuring what it claims to measure.