I was working through a tender last week from a public body with the usual stack of documents. The insurance section asked for employer’s liability at £10m, public liability at £5m and professional indemnity at £1m. Pass/fail.

We don’t have employer’s liability insurance because we don’t employ anyone. Llarn is two directors and a pool of self-employed associates (obviously, check that this is actually true for your business: a director can still be an employee, and employment status depends on the real working relationship, not just the label attached to it).

But the tender didn’t say ‘where applicable’ anywhere. It said £10m, full stop, upload your certificate.

There are two tempting moves for a small supplier at that point. You buy a policy you don’t need just to tick a box, or you quietly decide this one isn’t for you and move on.

I’ve watched plenty of good small providers do the second, and I understand why. When you’re reading a hundred pages of conditions against a deadline, a requirement that doesn’t fit how you work feels like a verdict.

I asked a two-sentence clarification question, anonymised, through the portal. Within a day the tender had been updated: where employer’s liability insurance isn’t legally required because you have no employees, provide written confirmation of that instead.

Nobody at that buyer had set out to shut small suppliers out. The requirement was template text, probably lifted from something bigger, and it was sitting there doing damage nobody intended. Under the Procurement Act, contracting authorities must have regard to the fact that small and medium-sized businesses may face particular barriers to participation and consider whether those barriers can be removed or reduced.

A lot of those barriers aren’t policy at all. They’re copy and paste, and the buyer can’t fix what nobody tells them about.

The clarification window is part of the process, and the answer goes to every bidder. So when you ask, you’re fixing it for everyone else in your position too.