month in review

UK public procurement in November 2016

29,078 UK public sector tenders and contract awards were published in November 2016 by 1,513 buying organisations, 1697% up on October 2016. 0% of those with a recorded route to market were awarded directly, without competition.

most active buyers

• Crown Commercial Service1,360
• Ministry of Defence896
• The University Of Nottingham803
• Highways Agency690
• Transport for London568
• University of the West of England555
• Defra554
• UK Shared Business Services Limited513
• Newcastle University509
• Department for Transport498

who won most

• Lens-tech188
• Insight Direct (UK) Ltd149
• Atkins Limited139
• Software Box Limited132
• Specialist Computer Centres PLC116
• Computacenter (UK) Limited115
• Aecom107
• Halcrow Group Ltd90
• Mott MacDonald Limited89
• Softcat Ltd79

biggest changes on October 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 3,513
• architecture and engineering 2,660
• business and professional services 2,482
• health and social care 2,346
• IT services 2,166
• research and development 1,824
• software and information systems 1,403
• education and training 1,110
• vehicles and transport equipment 959
• office and computer equipment 920

the biggest awarded contracts of November 2016

Contracts published in November 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 November 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.