Young professionals in tender teams

The requirement arises from an observation: participation requirements reward accumulated experience, and a selection based on them alone would structurally close the public market to professionals at the start of their careers. Experience is by definition what a young professional does not have.

The legislature's response was not to lower the requirements but to impose a composition: the competing team must include a young professional, holding the requirements the rules identify. The requirement concerns team composition and not the conditions of admission.

The mechanism was introduced under the previous regime by a ministerial regulation, and its provisions have largely been reproduced in the annex to the code dealing with the requirements of operators in architecture and engineering services. The continuity allows existing documentation to be reused.

The personal requirements concern qualification to practise and length of registration with the professional body, within the limits the rules lay down. The limits are expressed in years and are checked at the tender deadline.

The check should be made against the annex in force and against the tender documents, which normally refer to the requirements and specify how they are to be evidenced. The two sources may differ in the detail of how proof is given.

One element should be flagged for a practice's planning: length of registration is a figure that runs out over time, and a professional meeting the requirement today may not meet it in two years. Team composition should therefore be reviewed periodically rather than carried over from one procedure to the next.

Here sits the point on which case law has intervened and which determines whether the undertaking given is valid. It concerns the actual content of the role given.

The presence of a young professional is not satisfied by a nominal listing: the role given must involve design work. The role must be described in the documents and not merely attributed.

The administrative courts have, however, adopted a substantive reading. In a case where the young professional had been listed under the description of design support, that description was held not to vitiate the declaration made and signed, since the document the professional would sign was in any event a design document, and since the other team members were themselves described in varying terms such as coordinator, lead designer, landscape architect and safety coordinator.

The test that emerges is that what matters is the nature of the work rather than the label of the role. An ambiguous label does not in itself vitiate the declaration, provided the work assigned is genuinely design work.

Element	What the rules require	Where it is checked
Personal requirements	Qualification and length of registration	Annex to the code and the tender documents
Role given	Design work, not a nominal listing	The tender documents and the grouping mandate
Scope of design work	Includes the economic assessment of the project	Administrative case law and the providers article
Consistency with the chart	Presence in the operator's organisation chart	The organisation chart filed
In groupings	Which member the requirement attaches to	The tender documents

The same case law has clarified, precisely in relation to the duty to include a young professional, that design work is not only conceiving the project and producing the drawings. The concept is therefore wider than the current understanding.

It also includes assessing the project in economic and financial terms, since the article identifying operators in engineering and architecture services includes among qualifying services the assessment of technical and economic soundness, and therefore also the determination of the project's cost items. Estimating and quantity work therefore count among the qualifying activities.

That extension has a direct practical effect on team composition: a young professional given responsibility for preparing the bill of quantities or for the economic assessment of the project is carrying out design work for the purposes of the requirement. The options for composing a team widen accordingly.

The composition requirement must be read together with the general rule on the organisation chart. The two provisions apply together and not alternatively.

The members of the working team must coincide with the persons listed in the operator's organisation chart, which must contain those directly employed in carrying out the functions and must identify those linked by a stable and continuous relationship. The correspondence can be checked against the documents filed.

It follows that including a young professional cannot be resolved by an occasional designation at the time of the procedure: it must be built upstream, in the organisation chart of the practice or of the grouping. The organisation chart must be updated in advance and not on the eve of a procedure.

In temporary groupings the question arises as one of allocation, and the tender documents normally state which member of the grouping the requirement attaches to. Where no statement is given, a clarification request is worth filing.

Naming the young professional without including them in the organisation chart is the first, and falls into the defect case law penalises on organisation charts generally. The inconsistency can be checked in minutes against the documents filed.

Giving them a role unrelated to design work is the second, and does not satisfy the requirement whatever the formal correctness of the declaration. The content of the role prevails over its label.

Reusing a previous team composition without rechecking length of registration is the third, and produces a requirement that has lapsed with time. The check must be redone for each bid.

Overlooking that economic assessment of a project is design work is the fourth, and needlessly narrows the options for composing the team. The extension widens the range of roles that can be assigned.