month in review

UK public procurement in April 2016

1,164 UK public sector tenders and contract awards were published in April 2016 by 493 buying organisations, 1% down on March 2016. 0% of those with a recorded route to market were awarded directly, without competition.

most active buyers

• SE Shared Services35
• Derbyshire County Council23
• Noe-cpc23
• any of the projects listed on the portal14
• UK Shared Business Services Limited14
• Crown Commercial Service12
• NHS Shared Business Services12
• Liverpool City Council11
• Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council11
• Lancashire County Council10

who won most

• CDP Print Management4
• Coulson Associates Ltd3
• Dodd & Co Chartered Accountants Limited3
• Kpmg Llp3
• Life Coach Me3
• Potts Print (UK) Ltd3
• 3 Peaks Consulting Limited2
• A7 Advisory2
• abm Catering Limited2
• Accounting For Change2

biggest changes on March 2016

Change in the number of notices published, against the month before. Measured as an absolute change and shown only where it is at least ten notices — a buyer going from one notice to four is a 300% rise and means nothing.

what was bought

• construction work 215
• health and social care 148
• business and professional services 82
• architecture and engineering 71
• waste, cleaning and environment 48
• IT services 42
• software and information systems 42
• vehicles and transport equipment 37
• education and training 34
• catering, hotels and retail 33

the biggest awarded contracts of April 2016

Contracts published in April 2016 that name a winning supplier, ranked by the value the buyer published, excluding those flagged as a maximum rather than a price. Figures are as published; gvtcx does not adjust them. A large contract is often a multi-year framework, so the value is what may be spent over its whole life — and where several suppliers share one framework, each is shown against the framework's full value rather than its own share.

how this was counted

Notices published in April 2016 across Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Counts are of contracting processes, not published notices: a tender and its award notice are one contract and are counted once.

There is no total value on this page, deliberately. Published values repeat a framework's entire ceiling against every supplier on it, so a month containing one large framework would read as a spending spike that never happened. The median excludes anything flagged as a ceiling, and the reasoning is set out in full here. Where a total IS defensible — contracts awarded to a single supplier, with no framework — it is on the direct awards page.

A month stays open to revision: publishers backdate, so figures for the current month and the one before it may still move.