Only One Supplier Bid. Again! That is not a market problem

When a public sector tender closes and only one supplier has responded, the instinct is to look outward. The market is thin. The category is specialist. There are not enough qualified suppliers. These explanations are understandable, and in a small number of cases, accurate. But the data tells a different story. Single-bid contracting in European public procurement has not stabilised. It has worsened. And the primary driver is not the market. It is the process.

A decade of Declining Competition

The European Court of Auditors’ Special Report 28/2023, the most authoritative analysis of procurement competition across the EU, is unambiguous. Competition for public contracts decreased over the ten years to 2021, and the directives designed to increase it largely failed to do so. The ECA found that the single-bidding rate across member states had nearly doubled over the observed period. Countries including Slovenia, Cyprus, Poland, Czechia, and Hungary reported particularly high rates, but the trend was present across all economic sectors and all geographies.

The OECD’s Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook 2026 confirms that the trajectory continues: single bidding rates for above-threshold contracts in Europe have increased across the last decade, and the OECD now explicitly flags this as a potential integrity risk indicator, not merely an efficiency concern. When only one supplier responds to a tender, it becomes impossible to independently verify whether the award represented genuine value for money, or whether the process was designed, consciously or otherwise, to produce a predetermined outcome.

Single-Bidding Rate Trend — EU Public Procurement (Indicative, 2011–2023)

Source: European Court of Auditors SR 28/2023; European Commission Single Market Scoreboard 2024; OECD Integrity Outlook 2026

The reason may be the process not the suppliers

When the ECA surveyed procurement practitioners on why single-bidding occurs, the answer was not a shortage of suppliers. More than 40% cited restrictive criteria or requirements as the primary factor. The Open Contracting Partnership, analysing over 3.5 million government contracts across Europe, found that every additional item of information shared about a tender decreases the risk of a single-bid outcome. Transparency and accessibility drive participation. Complexity and opacity suppress it.

This is a procurement design problem. Overly technical specifications, lengthy pre-qualification requirements, compressed timelines, and burdensome documentation demands all function as effective barriers to entry, particularly for smaller suppliers, who lack the administrative capacity to navigate them. The European Commission’s own 2025 evaluation of the procurement directives confirms that the average number of bids per tender has fallen, even as large-value contracts continue to attract reasonable competition. The market for public procurement is not evenly thin. It is selectively concentrated and process complexity is what concentrates it.

“A study of more than 3.5 million government contracts across Europe determined that every additional item of information shared about a tender decreases the risk of a single-bid contract.”

— Open Contracting Partnership — Analysis of EU Public Procurement Directives Consultation, May 2025

The Legislative Response

European policymakers have acknowledged the problem at the highest level. The European Parliament passed a resolution on public procurement in September 2025 calling for structural reform of the competitive framework. The Council of the EU called for revision following the ECA’s findings. The forthcoming EU Public Procurement Act, which is currently receiving headlines regarding its possible changes, lists competition improvement and SME access as explicit objectives. In the UK, the Procurement Act 2023 introduces procedural simplifications aimed at increasing supplier participation and encourages the division of large contracts into lots to lower barriers for smaller organisations.

The scale of the gap is illustrated by a single OECD statistic: only 7% of member countries currently have a standalone strategy dedicated to increasing competition in public tenders. Competition in public procurement does not improve by default. It requires deliberate design and most procurement systems have not been built with participation as a primary objective.

Why Suppliers Do Not Bid: Causes of Single Bidding — ECA Practitioner Survey

Source: European Court of Auditors Special Report 28/2023 — survey of procurement officials across EU member states

AI & Technology – A Grounded Perspective

What AI can do – and what it cannot do

Where AI creates genuine participation gains

AI can meaningfully reduce the friction that drives suppliers away from public tenders. Automated document generation can produce clearer, less jargon-heavy specifications. AI-assisted market analysis can identify suppliers who should be bidding but are not, enabling proactive outreach before a tender is published. Compliance pre-checks can reduce the documentation burden on smaller suppliers who lack dedicated bid-writing teams. Chile’s ChileCompra platform, cited by the OECD as a model for AI-assisted procurement, uses smart matching and framework agreements to connect public buyers with a broader supplier base, and has become the largest virtual marketplace for public procurement in Chile, specifically designed to foster inclusiveness and competition among suppliers who would not otherwise engage with government tendering.

The Critical Limit

The Open Contracting Partnership’s analysis of the EU Directives consultation is direct: the solution lies in digitisation, transparency, and genuine market engagement rather than procedural shortcuts that reduce the number of contracts subject to competitive requirements. Better market engagement before tender publication. Earlier supplier dialogue. Shorter, clearer documentation requirements. More granular, real-time data on where competition is and is not occurring, so targeted interventions can replace broad structural inertia.

The single-bid problem is not inevitable. It is not structural. It is not a feature of the market. It is a feature of the process that excludes the market and processes, unlike markets, can be deliberately redesigned.

5 Recommendations for Procurement Leaders

1. Audit your tender design for exclusionary language before publication.

Review specifications, pre-qualification criteria, and documentation requirements with the explicit question: does this exclude capable suppliers who could deliver? Technical requirements written by subject matter experts without commercial challenge routinely over-specify. A structured review at drafting stage costs very little and directly reduces the single-bid risk.

2. Publish a procurement pipeline and engage the market early.

The single biggest intervention available to public sector buyers is visibility. Publishing a forward pipeline of procurement activity gives suppliers time to assess opportunities, build capacity, and prepare credible bids. Market engagement before tender publication is now a Procurement Act 2023 expectation, not a nice-to-have.

3. Use contract lots to open the market to smaller suppliers.

The UK Procurement Act 2023 actively encourages the division of contracts into lots. This is a direct mechanism for increasing supplier participation. Organisations with persistently high single-bid rates should examine whether large, bundled contracts are structurally excluding the suppliers they need.

4. Track your single-bid rate as a performance indicator, not just a procurement outcome.

Only 7% of OECD member countries have a standalone competition strategy. The first step is measurement. If your organisation does not currently track and report single-bid rates by category and contract type, you have no baseline from which to improve and no evidence to present to scrutiny bodies when competition is questioned.

5. Use AI to expand market reach, not to replicate existing supplier relationships.

AI-assisted market analysis and smart supplier matching are genuinely useful tools for identifying suppliers beyond the usual network. But the technology amplifies the intent behind it. Organisations that use AI to reach new suppliers will see competition improve. Those that use it to process familiar incumbent pipelines more efficiently will not. The strategic decision comes first.

Key Takeaways

• Single-bid contracting is not a market problem. It is a process problem. Over 40% of above-threshold EU contracts are now awarded with only one bidder, a rate that has nearly doubled in a decade, and practitioners consistently identify restrictive criteria and administrative burden, not market thinness, as the primary causes.
• The European Court of Auditors, OECD, European Parliament, and European Commission have all identified declining competition as a systemic failure requiring structural reform. The forthcoming EU Public Procurement Act and the UK’s Procurement Act 2023 both reflect legislative acknowledgement that the current framework has not delivered competitive markets.
• Every additional item of information shared about a tender reduces single-bid risk, according to analysis of 3.5 million European contracts. Transparency is not a compliance output. It is a competition lever and it is one that procurement teams can pull without waiting for legislative reform.
• AI can reduce the friction that excludes suppliers: clearer specifications, lower compliance burdens, better market intelligence, and smarter supplier matching. But AI applied to a process designed around an incumbent supplier will simply make that exclusion more efficient. The commitment to competition must precede the technology.
• The organisations that will make meaningful progress on this are those that treat single-bid rates as a performance indicator, set explicit competition targets, and hold procurement leadership accountable for improving them — not just for filling the contract register.