Nuclear fallout in procurement award process

Forget the Hinkley Point procurement process for a minute and let's reflect on the procurement process for the £7bn decommissioning of the UK's first generation of nuclear power plants - yes, they got it wrong!  Well at least that was the judgement of Mr Juctice Fraser at the High Court; now the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority "are considering [their] legal options".

So what went wrong?

1. A bidder, which should have been excluded from the process due to omissions in its submission, was allowed to progress to the next stage;
2. Bidders were not treated on equal terms - allegedly one tenderer was disadvantaged in the scoring;
3. "Experts" evaluating the submissions manipulated their calculations to arrive at their preferred outcome; 
4. The wrong consortium were awarded the contract.

All fairly basic breaches of procurement good practice and yet potentially this would have gone unnoticed had one consortium not challenged the award.  

Were no concerns expressed by the evaluation team? Were there no whistle-blowers? Was this just incompetence or perhaps something more sinister? 

Let's remember that the wrongful award appears to have had a significant detrimental impact on the wronged bidder. There will now be compensation costs and possibly significant delays to completion of the work which needed to be completed. And of course, significant reputational damage to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and its procurement advisors. Not a good CV entry and not a good look for the profession.

Massive amounts of money being spent are no excuse for not getting the basics right.