RM6399 Is Live: The Five Week Plan to 9 November 2026
The Government Commercial Agency published the RM6399 Consultancy and Professional Services tender on Find a Tender on 15 September 2026. Ten lots, £5 billion excluding VAT, up to 500 suppliers, replacing MCF4. Clarification questions close at 3pm on 22 October and submissions close at 3pm on Monday 9 November on BravoSolution. Here is what to do each week.
By Jean-Pascal Olivier, Director. Published 6 October 2026. Dates from Find a Tender notice 2026/S 000-087183.
Why five weeks is enough, and why most bidders will waste two of them
Eight of the ten RM6399 lots are scored 90 percent on quality. That is unusual, and it changes the plan. Price will not rescue a thin response and discounting will not win a lot that was always going to be decided on evidence. The money and the hours go into the written submission, which means the evidence has to exist before the writing starts.
The bidders who lose on frameworks like this are not the ones who ran out of time. They are the ones who spent weeks one and two deciding whether to bid, week three gathering evidence that should have been in a library already, and weeks four and five writing without a review. The plan below front-loads the decisions so the last fortnight is for quality, not for panic.
Two exceptions to the quality rule. Lot 1 Multidisciplinary is 80 percent price with a £2 million call-off cap including VAT and extensions: the rate card decides it and the quality response can only lose it. Lot 10 Restructuring and Insolvency is 70 percent quality and 30 percent price, with a stated requirement to demonstrate expertise in distressed corporate situations. If either is on your list, the plan for that lot starts with the commercial model.
The plan, week by week
Week 1 (6 to 12 October)
Register, read, and decide the lots
- Register on the BravoSolution portal and express interest in RM6399 so the full ITT pack is visible: Framework Schedule 1 specification, conditions of participation, quality questions, pricing schedules and the customer list
- Read the conditions of participation first. Financial standing, insurance and accreditation gates are pass or fail, and a gap found in week four is a gap you cannot close
- Map your evidence onto the ten lots using the published weightings. Lot 1 is 80 percent price with a £2 million call-off cap; Lots 2 to 9 are 90 percent quality; Lot 10 is 70 percent quality
- Decide which lots you will bid. Two or three bid properly beats six bid thinly, and the lot decision drives everything that follows
- Name the bid team and the named individuals whose CVs will go in, and confirm their availability for the next five weeks
Week 2 (13 to 19 October)
Clarifications, compliance matrix and the evidence call
- Draft and submit every clarification question you have. The deadline is 3pm on 22 October and questions after it are not answered. Scope boundaries between lots, the Lot 1 cap, exclusions on Lots 8 and 9, and anything in the conditions you are not certain you meet
- Build a compliance matrix from the ITT: every question, every attachment, every pricing cell, with an owner and a date
- Run the evidence call: for each lot, list the three to five engagements you will use, with the client, the problem, the intervention, the measured result and the permission position
- Start the rate card. On Lot 1 it decides the result; on the other lots it needs to be deliverable for four years rather than designed to win
- Check accreditations are current and in the correct legal entity, including Cyber Essentials, which the GCA agreement page describes as characteristic of suppliers on this agreement
Week 3 (20 to 26 October)
Write the evidence before the answers
- Write the case studies to the number: baseline, intervention, result, date. A 14 day process reduced to 4 and held for a year is evidence; a programme delivered on time is a schedule
- Write the CVs against the lot, not as career histories. The evaluator is matching the person to the work the lot will buy
- Read the published clarification responses on 22 October and after, and update the compliance matrix for anything that changed
- Draft the quality responses for the first lot, using the evidence already written. Knowledge transfer and the social value and carbon reduction content need real commitments, not intentions
- Complete the pricing schedules in draft and sense-check them against the weighting on each lot
Week 4 (27 October to 2 November)
Complete, review against the criteria, and fix
- Finish the quality responses for every lot. Each answer should be checkable against the published criterion it is answering
- Independent review by someone who did not write the responses, scoring each answer against the criteria as an evaluator would and marking every claim without evidence
- Fix what the review finds. This is the week that separates a 70 percent submission from a 90 percent one, and it only exists if the writing finished on time
- Upload everything to the portal by Monday 2 November, five working days before the deadline, and record what was uploaded
Week 5 (3 to 9 November)
Contingency, final checks and submit
- Final compliance check against the matrix: every question answered, every attachment in the right place, every pricing cell complete
- Resolve anything the portal flags on upload. This is the week for it, not the final afternoon
- Submit well before 3pm on Monday 9 November and keep the portal confirmation. Late submissions are not accepted
- Start the post-submission file: evaluator clarifications can arrive at any point in the evaluation, and the team that wrote the bid should be able to answer them
If you are on MCF4, and if you have never held a CCS framework
MCF4 incumbents are rebidding, not renewing. The GCA agreement page states that RM6399 replaces RM6309, and places are not carried across. Your call-off delivery data, satisfaction evidence and performance records are exactly what a new submission needs and a challenger cannot produce. The incumbent mistake is assuming the evaluator already knows that and writing a thinner answer than a new entrant would. Map your MCF4 lots and live call-offs onto the ten new lots in week one, because the structure has changed and Lot 1 is price-led in a way MCF4 work won on quality may not suit.
First-time bidders should take the SME and VCSE suitability flag on every lot at face value. The notice caps the framework at 500 suppliers, and a 90 percent quality weighting is the fairest competition a smaller firm will find: three engagements described to the number outscore a general capability statement from a firm fifty times your size. The gates are the conditions of participation, so read those in week one and know whether you clear them before you spend a day on anything else.
The full framework facts, the lot table and one page per lot are on the RM6399 hub. The dated countdown is on the RM6399 deadline page.
32 days. Decide this week.
Tell us what you sell and who you sell it to. We will tell you which lots to bid, what evidence you are missing and what a fixed fee submission would cost. If it is not winnable we say so in the first conversation.
Send us your lot shortlist
Which RM6399 lots are you considering, and what is your strongest piece of evidence for each? A director replies the same working day.