Every housing association and council contract worth having starts with the same unglamorous obstacle: a questionnaire and a folder of evidence. The good news is that the PQQ documents list UK contractor teams get asked for barely changes between buyers. Across the 557 UK buyer gates, portals and supply-chain entrances we track, the same handful of categories come round again and again: identity, financials, insurance, health and safety, accreditations, trade registrations, policies and references. Build that folder once, name the files properly, and a PQQ stops being a fortnight of chasing paperwork and becomes an afternoon of uploading.
PQQ, SQ, or the same thing under a different name
Public buyers formally moved from the PQQ to the Selection Questionnaire years ago, and under the current procurement rules above-threshold public buyers pull your core company details from the government's Central Digital Platform using a supplier share code rather than asking you to retype them. Housing associations, ALMOs, managing agents and tier-1 main contractors still say PQQ, and most of them still run their own version of it.
The practical point is that the two documents ask for the same evidence. A Selection Questionnaire is structured into exclusion grounds, economic and financial standing, and technical ability. A housing association PQQ covers exactly those three areas with more questions about repairs experience, operatives in occupied homes and how you manage subcontractors.
The PQQ documents list UK contractor bids are built on
Here is the standard set. Get every item into one folder as a dated PDF before you look at a single tender.
- Company identity - legal name exactly as it appears at Companies House, company registration number (portals also accept a Unique Taxpayer Reference if you are not incorporated), registered office, legal structure, VAT number, website, and a monitored tenders inbox rather than a director's personal email.
- Financial standing - turnover for the last three financial years, filed accounts for the last two or three years, your accounts year end, bank details and an awareness of your own credit score. Buyers frequently cap contract value at a multiple of turnover, so a strong PQQ does not save a bid that is simply too big for your balance sheet.
- Insurance certificates - employers' liability, public liability, professional indemnity where you give any design or advice, and contractors' all risks. Portals capture insurer, policy number, start and end dates, value per event and value in aggregate for each one.
- Health and safety pack - a signed and dated H&S policy reviewed within the last twelve months, your competent H&S advisor (internal or retained), a blank RAMS template plus two or three completed examples, accident and RIDDOR figures for three years, and a training matrix showing who holds what.
- Accreditations - an SSIP badge (SMAS, CHAS, SafeContractor or another recognised scheme, and one deems-to-satisfy the others), Constructionline where the buyer filters on it, and the Common Assessment Standard only once you are chasing tier-1 work.
- Trade registrations and cards - Gas Safe company and engineer categories, NICEIC or NAPIT enrolment for electrical, F-Gas, OFTEC, CSCS cards per operative, DBS checks for anyone entering occupied homes, and an upper-tier waste carrier licence if you move your own construction waste.
- Policy pack - environmental, quality or QMS statement, equality and diversity, modern slavery, anti-bribery, data protection with your ICO registration, safeguarding for schools and care settings, business continuity, subcontractor management and a complaints procedure.
- Track record - three referenceable contracts with organisation, named contact, email, phone, value, scope and dates, plus two or three one-page case studies with photographs.
Of the roughly 130 housing association, ALMO and council gates in our dataset, around 100 spell out their document requirements up front. Only about 38 publish a hard insurance figure on the form itself, because those numbers are set per contract, not per portal.
What is optional and what is genuinely blocking
Not every item on the PQQ documents list UK contractor teams assemble carries the same weight. Insurance and an SSIP badge are the two that stop bids dead: SSIP is referenced by around 120 of the gates we track, and Constructionline by just over 100. A missing environmental policy is usually a scoring deduction. A missing employers' liability certificate is a rejection.
What assessors actually check
Most of the PQQ documents list UK contractor teams submit is checked mechanically before a human reads a word of your method statement. The checks are boring and they are where good contractors lose marks:
- Dates. Is the H&S policy signed, dated and reviewed inside twelve months? Is every insurance certificate in date on the submission deadline, not just today?
- Name consistency. Does the name on the insurance certificate match the legal entity on the tender exactly? "T/A" trading names and old registered addresses cause more failures than anything technical.
- Cover values. Assessors read value per event and value in aggregate as separate fields. Ask your broker to raise a limit for a specific contract if the tender needs more than you hold.
- Blanks and zeros. RIDDOR reportables of zero must be written as zero. Left blank, it reads as an unanswered question.
- Referees who answer. Housing and public-sector references get called. Warn your contact before you name them.
- Companies House. Portals pull your filings automatically. Late accounts or an overdue confirmation statement flag red before anyone sees your bid.
For a young company, management accounts plus a clean credit file will usually carry the financial section. Being honest about being an SME is fine, and self-declaring SME status is standard on almost every form.
Registration is free. The vetting comes later
The most common misconception among contractors is that portal registration is the gate. It is not. Registering only creates a supplier account and a searchable profile. Across the biggest UK e-tendering family we checked, supplier registration was free on every instance, and 118 of the 130 housing and council gates in our sweep showed no supplier-side fee at all. The paid part of this world is the accreditation layer: SSIP schemes and Constructionline charge annual fees banded by headcount or turnover.
Real vetting happens at tender stage. That is where hard insurance minimums, SSIP requirements, financial checks and named references are enforced. So register widely and cheaply, monitor the categories that fit your patch, and spend your money on the two or three badges that unlock the most work rather than collecting all of them. If you want to sanity check whether a bid is worth the effort at all, the bid-or-no-bid economics discussed on Construction Arbitrage are a useful counterweight to the instinct to answer everything.
One folder, consistent filenames, a renewal calendar
Name files so an assessor and your own team can read them at a glance, for example CompanyName-EL-Insurance-exp-2027-03.pdf. Keep the whole PQQ documents list UK contractor buyers ask for in one canonical folder, and diarise every expiry: insurance, SSIP, Constructionline, ICO registration, cards and DBS checks. An expired certificate does not generate a warning email on most portals. It quietly removes you from the approved list.
Comparing notes with other trades is worth more than any template. The community over at Contractor Club is a reasonable place to see how other UK contractors have answered the same social value and subcontractor-management questions.
Where PlanaJob fits
The PQQ pack is how you win framework and contract work. It is not how you win the day-to-day repairs that keep an engineer busy between bigger jobs. On PlanaJob, property managers and letting agents raise maintenance jobs and compare quotes from vetted contractors, so the vetting you have already done for PQQs travels with you rather than sitting in a folder. Your insurance, trade registrations and references are the same evidence, reused, which is the whole argument for treating the PQQ documents list UK contractor buyers demand as one asset rather than a per-bid scramble.
If you have your documents together, set up a contractor profile and put them to work while your framework applications are in progress. For how housing associations actually structure their buying, and where PQQs sit inside frameworks and dynamic purchasing systems, see the related guides on the PlanaJob blog.
FAQ
How long is a PQQ documents list UK contractor pack valid for?
There is no single expiry. Each document has its own: insurance certificates run to the policy end date, an H&S policy is expected to have been reviewed within twelve months, SSIP and Constructionline memberships are annual, and financial information is expected to reflect your most recently filed accounts. Treat the pack as a live asset and review it quarterly.
Do I need Constructionline and an SSIP badge before I register?
No. Register first, because registration is free and it is how you see what is coming to market. Buy the badges when a real opportunity requires them, starting with one SSIP scheme, since one recognised SSIP is accepted in place of the others by the rest.
What if I have no housing or public-sector references?
Use the strongest commercial or managing-agent contracts you have and be specific about scope, value and duration rather than padding the list. Most PQQs ask for three references but will accept fewer with an explanation. Subcontracting to a firm that already holds the framework is the usual route to building relevant references quickly.