NCG demands std. form

Top contractors are compiling a standard form for contract pre-qualification to fight clients who are demanding excessive and unnecessary information from firms before awarding them work.

An eight man working party from the National Contractors Group has compiled a standardised pre-qualification questionnaire for contractors which it wants the Department of the Environment to adopt. The document will be put before the NCG's council in the next few days and will be submitted to the DoE by the end of the month.

A Contract Journal survey (see 5 May) highlighted contractors' dissatisfaction with the pre-qualification process and particularly the tendency for clients' project managers to request commercially sensitive information before allowing a firm to compete for work.

This information would then be used to the benefit of the project manager.

Sir Michael Latham is looking at the problem and confirmed this week that he will be making recommendations on qualifying and pre-qualifying in his industry review. And specialist contractor body Casec is also examining the situation and carrying out its own survey on clients attitudes.

One top contractor said this week that the information called for by public sector clients is totally unrelated to the contract. He said: 'What they are doing is building a data bank in order to better sell their wares as project managers and spread their wings in the data market.'

Information is required on who a contractor has worked for, who the senior partners are, what claims have been made by and against the firm and in what disputes. They also have to show a breakdown of ethnic groups in different levels of the company.

The contractor complained that the requests were time wasting and said that Ministry of Defence project managers were the worst.

'We comply with the MoD's standardised questionnaire at the outset which gets us its stamp of approval, only to have to fill in a virtually identical form every time we tender for a contract.'

One recent MoD design and build tender is thought to have cost each bidder more than œ250,000.

The new standard form is expected to address this problem and make pre-qualification a simpler process.

Stephen Shipp, Mowlem's southern division director, said: 'The form would offer an 80-90 per cent cut in preparation work while clients would find a standardised form easier to read. The DoE is welcome to add further questions if it thinks we have left anything out.'

A spokesman said the DoE welcomed any proposals for consideration.