Saying "detailed" isn't enough — show why a low price holds up
The Council of State suspends an award because the contracting authority accepted an abnormally low price with nothing more than the platitude that the justification was 'detailed'.
What happened?
The city of Ypres tendered a large cleaning contract for its municipal services and local police, split into seven lots. For three lots, the chosen tenderer's price was more than 20% below the average — a legal presumption of abnormally low pricing. The city requested a price justification, received a detailed Excel file in return, and accepted it each time with the same sentence: 'The justification is detailed and based on the ABSU-UGBN wage.' The losing tenderer appealed to the Council of State, arguing that this reasoning was an empty formula. The Council agreed: nowhere did it appear that the city had examined the full price structure — not the number of hours, not the subsidised contracts, not the other cost items. The award was suspended.
Why does this matter?
Price investigations in cleaning and other service contracts are a recurring battleground. This ruling confirms that a contracting authority cannot rely on a generic formula to approve a low price — even if the justification itself is detailed. For bid managers, this means a competitor with a suspiciously low price cannot simply be waved through.
The lesson
When you lose, always check how the contracting authority justified the price investigation in the award decision. If you find only a standard phrase without substantive analysis of the cost structure, you may have a strong argument to challenge the decision.
Check yourself
Does the award decision contain a genuine substantive justification of the price investigation, or just a generic formula?