The High Court has refused Robert Owens’s application to overturn Kildare County Council’s decision to exclude him from a tender competition for planned building maintenance works.
In a judgment delivered on 4 September 2020, Mr Justice Quinn found that the council acted within its discretion when it eliminated Mr Owens after he did not submit a quality assessment proposal or a revised pricing document requested during the process. The court held that the decision was not a manifest error and refused the reliefs he sought.
The competition concerned a multi-party framework for refurbishment and maintenance works on council housing across County Kildare. It had two lots: a minor works panel and a quick-turnaround works panel. Mr Owens had been invited to submit tenders for both.
The council wrote to him on 12 November 2018, saying no quality submission had accompanied his tender and that the Lot 2 pricing document contained amounts it considered abnormally high and low. It asked him to provide the quality submission and a revised pricing document by 20 November. In his reply, Mr Owens said he had intended to submit a quality proposal but did not provide one. He stood over his low rates and did not submit a revised pricing document.
The court rejected his argument that material submitted at the earlier prequalification stage satisfied the quality-submission requirement. The tender documents required a quality submission for each lot, with a limited exception allowing reference to earlier material for team members’ CVs. The judge also accepted that the council’s letter had not misleadingly limited the quality-submission request to Lot 1.
Mr Owens argued that other tenderers received specific guidance on adjusting prices, while he did not. The council’s later letters identified fewer than ten pricing issues for those tenderers; it said 438 of 619 Lot 2 items in Mr Owens’s document were abnormally priced. The judge found the scale of the issues, together with the missing quality submission, placed his tender in a materially different position. The subsequent engagement with other tenderers did not amount to unfair or unequal treatment.
The court also found that the council’s 14 December 2018 letter gave reasons for the exclusion. Although Mr Owens’s December and January letters clearly indicated an intention to seek the review available under Lot 1’s tender instructions, the council did not refer the matter to the Society of Chartered Surveyors. The judge concluded that the review would not have been binding and Mr Owens had not shown resulting prejudice. The court therefore refused to quash the exclusion decisions.