Involve Visual Collaboration, brought a claim on the basis that there were breaches of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.
The DWP excluded the claimant from the procurement, notified in a contract award notice on the basis that it had failed to achieve the minimum required threshold score.
The Court concluded as follows:
- The DWP’s decision to re-moderate the scores for Question 6.4 was not in breach of the principle of transparency and/or manifestly erroneous.
- The defendant was in breach of the principle of transparency, based on the use of extraneous material to evaluate the claimant’s proposal during the re-moderation but that breach had no effect on the outcome of the re-moderation or the procurement and caused no loss to the claimant.
- The defendant’s approach in the re-moderation, namely, that URL masking was not capable of meeting the requirements of Question 6.4, was not manifestly erroneous.
- The score awarded to the claimant for Question 6.4 on re-moderation was not manifestly erroneous.
- The defendant was entitled to, and would have, rejected the claimant’s tender in any event for failure to comply with the conflict of interest rules in the ITT and the agreed mitigation measures.
- The claimant was not entitled to any relief, save for a declaration that the defendant was in breach of the principles of transparency by referring to extraneous material in the re-moderation.