In short
- Four different failures look identical on a scoring sheet. The fix differs for each.
- Certification lead times mean the next bid is often already lost. Plan two bids ahead.
- Ask the buyer for the scoring breakdown. Most will give it and most bidders never ask.
Losing a tender on carbon criteria usually means one of four things, and they need different fixes. You did not hold a certification the buyer scored on. You held it at too low a tier. You had the data but presented it in the wrong format. Or your reduction plan was judged not credible.
Only one of those is fixable before your next bid. Working out which one you hit is the first job, and most bidders skip it.
How do you find out what actually went wrong?
Ask the buyer for the scoring breakdown. Under public procurement rules you are generally entitled to feedback on how your bid scored, and in most cases you can get the per-criterion detail if you ask specifically for it.
Ask three questions. What score did we receive on the sustainability criteria and what was the maximum. What did the winning score look like on those criteria. What evidence would have scored higher.
Most bidders send a polite thank-you and move on. The feedback is the single cheapest piece of competitive research available to you, and it tells you whether you lost by a point or by a mile. Those two situations warrant completely different responses.
Which of the four failures was it?
You did not hold the certification. In Dutch public works this is usually the CO2-Prestatieladder. Rijkswaterstaat awards on it and ProRail has done so since 2010, so if you bid into those chains it was already scoreable. If the buyer scored it and you had nothing, no amount of better writing would have helped.
You held it at too low a tier. Under Handboek 4.0 the ladder's five niveaus became three treden, and each authority sets its own award advantage: Rijkswaterstaat applies 2, 4 and 6 percent, and ProRail proposes 4, 7 and 10 percent from 1 January 2027. A fictitious reduction is a discount applied to your bid for scoring purposes, so a competitor a tier above you effectively bid lower than you at the same price. This is the most painful loss because you did the work and still lost on it.
Wrong format. In UK central government work above GBP 5 million a year, PPN 006 requires a carbon reduction plan in a prescribed format covering scope 1, scope 2 and five named scope 3 categories. A perfectly good sustainability report that is not that document scores as if you had submitted nothing. Our PPN 006 checklist covers what the format actually requires.
The plan was not credible. You submitted targets with no costed measures behind them, or a baseline nobody could follow. Evaluators increasingly score the credibility of the plan rather than the ambition of the number.
What can you fix before the next bid?
Be realistic about lead times, because this is where the planning usually goes wrong.
Format and credibility problems are fixable now. If you had the data and presented it badly, that is weeks of work. Get the required document format, rebuild the submission against it, and make sure every target has a costed measure and a named owner behind it.
Certification is not fixable now. Getting onto the ladder or moving up a tier takes months, including an external audit. If you lost because you were not certified, your next bid is probably lost too, and the one after that is the one you are actually playing for.
That is uncomfortable and worth saying plainly, because the instinct after a loss is to fix it for the next submission. On certification you cannot. Plan two bids ahead.
Data quality sits in between. If your baseline was thin, improving it takes a reporting cycle to do properly. You can improve presentation immediately and improve substance over a year.
How do you stop it happening again?
Three things, in order of return.
Find out what your competitors hold. Certification registers are public. Look up the firms you regularly lose to and find out what tier they are at. That tells you the bar rather than making you guess at it.
Run the arithmetic on the tier. Take your typical bid value, apply the fictitious reduction for the tier above you, and compare the difference to the cost of getting there. For contractors bidding regularly on public work this usually settles the question in one calculation.
Make reporting annual rather than per-bid. The expensive version of this is rebuilding a footprint every time a tender appears, in a hurry, from scratch. The cheap version is maintaining an inventory continuously so a bid submission is an export rather than a project. That difference is the main practical argument for a platform over a spreadsheet or a one-off consultancy engagement.
What does Hedgehog do here?
The platform names the CO2-Prestatieladder and PPN 006 as reporting outputs, and guides you through building a GHG inventory and a data collection plan with an AI guide, with human GHG experts reachable in-app. The point for tender work is that the inventory persists between bids.
Free account with no sales call, Pro from EUR 1,200 per year.
Two honest caveats.
The first inventory is work. A G2 reviewer said in August 2026 that once the data is loaded everything works perfectly, and getting it loaded is the challenging part. If your next tender is in three weeks, software will not save that bid. It will save the one after.
Certification is a separate process with a separate auditor. No platform certifies you. It produces the inventory and the documentation that certification and tenders require. Getting to a tier still involves an external body and a timeline you do not control.
What should you do this week?
Email the buyer and ask for the per-criterion scoring breakdown. Then look up two competitors on the certification register.
Those two facts together tell you whether you are one presentational fix away or one certification cycle away, and everything else follows from that.
If it is the certification cycle, book a call and we can work through the tier arithmetic against your actual bid pipeline. If you want to see where your data stands first, start a free account and build a first footprint.
Sources: SKAO, UK Cabinet Office PPN 006, Hedgehog platform, Hedgehog on G2. Verified 27 August 2026.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-08-27.
