Twenty-three notices arrived in one contractor’s feed over a quarter. Their published values added up to £2.46bn. The contractor’s turnover was £3.3m. Nobody believed the £2.46bn, but nobody had a better number either, so the bid team was arguing about a £750m NHS framework and a £36k UPS replacement as if they were comparable things.
Face value is a property of the notice, not the opportunity
A framework value is the buyer’s estimate of everything that might be called off, by everyone, across every lot, for the whole term. A single supplier’s share of that is small, and for a specialist subcontractor it is smaller still. A programme value is the cost of a decade of civils, of which an electrical package might be a few per cent.
So the first thing a pipeline report does is replace face value with addressable value. Standalone contracts count in full. Framework values are reduced to a realistic single-supplier share, and both frameworks and very large programmes are capped relative to the firm’s largest delivered project. The published value is still shown, hatched, so the discount is visible.
The exact share and caps are printed in every report, so the client can argue with them. Publishing them here would tell competitors more than it would tell you.
What it did to the list
The £2.46bn became £54.65m addressable. The £750m framework became a low-single-digit-millions figure, and dropped from first to fifth once win likelihood was applied, because the visible notice did not confirm an electrical lot and the competition would include much larger M&E contractors. An £11m electrical engineering framework with a maximum of two suppliers became £550k addressable and rose to first, because everything about it fitted and the firm already held both credentials the buyer named.
The £36k UPS job stayed where it was: a quick win worth doing only if a crew was free.
Expected value, and why it is not a forecast
Addressable multiplied by win likelihood gives expected value, which the report uses to rank. Win likelihood is a weighted heuristic, with the weights printed on every tender page. It is a way of ordering effort, not a prediction of outcomes, and we say so on every chart because the alternative is a bid team that starts to believe the number.
The point of the exercise is not precision. It is that four notices worth £21m addressable at the highest win likelihood in the pipeline are now at the top of the list, and three weeks of writing time is no longer going on a framework that was never yours.
How the caps and weights work is on the method page. What a full report contains is on the tender pipeline page.
Sources
- The figures are from the anonymised worked example described on the method page: 23 notices, £2.46bn published value, £54.65m addressable, generated 10 September 2026.
- Frameworks, call-offs and the notice types under the Procurement Act 2023: Cabinet Office, Procurement Act 2023 short guides.
- How addressable value is derived: our approach.