month in review
UK public procurement in September 2020
3,769 UK public sector tenders and contract awards were published in September 2020 by 959 buying organisations, 12% up on August 2020. 10.2% of those with a recorded route to market were awarded directly, without competition.
most active buyers
- Department of Health and Social Care111
- Suffolk Sourcing93
- NHS England86
- UK Shared Business Services Limited86
- Defra Network eTendering Portal49
- Ministry of Defence49
- Department for Education39
- Homes England (the name adopted by the Homes and Communities Agency)37
- Transport for London37
- Department for Work and Pensions36
who won most
- Wilkin Chapman LLP22
- Softcat PLC17
- Deloitte LLP16
- Insight Direct (UK) Ltd16
- Prestige Domestic Property Maintenance16
- Bytes Software Services Limited14
- Venesky Brown Ltd13
- Ernst & Young LLP12
- Motus Commercials Derby10
- Phoenix Software Limited10
biggest changes on August 2020
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.
| buyer | August 2020 | September 2020 | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Department of Health and Social Care | 2 | 111 | +109 |
| FCDO Services | 90 | 1 | -89 |
| NHS England | 2 | 86 | +84 |
| Suffolk Sourcing | 146 | 93 | -53 |
| Gloucestershire County Council | 81 | 29 | -52 |
| Newcastle University | 50 | 3 | -47 |
| Department for Education | 11 | 39 | +28 |
| Department for Work and Pensions | 12 | 36 | +24 |
| UK Shared Business Services Limited | 62 | 86 | +24 |
| NHS Improvement | 2 | 25 | +23 |
what was bought
- construction work 541
- business and professional services 436
- IT services 285
- software and information systems 237
- health and social care 218
- architecture and engineering 197
- transport services 180
- research and development 162
- vehicles and transport equipment 132
- repair and maintenance 131
the biggest awarded contracts of September 2020
Contracts published in September 2020 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 September 2020 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.