First of all, hope you and your good lady are keeping yourself safe, even more so in these dark days. Hopefully, we will all come out of this in a few months' time and reflect on something quite pivotal in our lives. Until then, take care of yourselves!
It does seem odd that Corserv should get that sort of assistance in tendering for ANY business vs other commercial organisations. It doesn't so much affect this bid but it does provide them with a competitive advantage over commercial organisations.
In terms of this bid, the fact that the Go Ahead bid was higher than First's isn't an issue per se.
Big caveat here: We don't know what the scoring system was for this tender but from experience, the commercial score is NOT a straight comparison of pounds and pence. Also, how the quality aspect was scored is not known by anyone here AFAIK? So the next couple of paragraphs are supposition as to what could have happened.
Let's say the commercial score is worth 50% of the total marks. Not knowing what the costs are but let's say the it was £15m p.a. against FK's bid of £12m. So 50 x (lowest compliant bid price divided by the tenderer's bid price) = so Go Ahead score 40 points and FK would have scored 50.
Then you have the technical or quality score also being 50% of the total marks. They'd be a raft of anodyne questions with various criteria that you have to hit. These will be marked (as
@Goldfish62 used to do) by 3 or more assessors to get a representative score for each question. If Go Ahead did some sort of exceptional job and FK didn't, they might have scored 48 and FK scored 37 so Go Ahead would get the gig despite being more expensive because the quality of their bid response was better.
That make sense?