month in review

UK public procurement in December 2020

4,332 UK public sector tenders and contract awards were published in December 2020 by 976 buying organisations, 7% down on November 2020. 7.5% of those with a recorded route to market were awarded directly, without competition.

notices

4,332

buyers

976

named a winner

3,132

awarded directly

7.5%

median value

£100,000

most active buyers

who won most

biggest changes on November 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	November 2020	December 2020	change
FCDO Services	27	91	+64
Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)	92	32	-60
Department of Health and Social Care	95	149	+54
Cefas	0	47	+47
Home Office	51	90	+39
City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council	41	9	-32
UK Research and Innovation	72	103	+31
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust	10	38	+28
North Ayrshire Council	27	1	-26
Transport for London	7	32	+25

what was bought

the biggest awarded contracts of December 2020

contract	buyer	won by	value
Next Generation Munitions Solution	Ministry of Defence, Weapons, Defence General Munitions (DGM) Project Team	BAE Systems Global Combat Systems Munitions	£3,400,000,000
Next Generation Munitions Solution (NGMS)	MINISTRY OF DEFENCE	BAE SYSTEMS GLOBAL COMBAT SYSTEMS MUNITIONS LIMITED	£3,400,000,000
Lateral Flow Testing Kits	Department of Health and Social Care (T&T)	Abbott Rapid Diagnostics Limited +4	£911,542,857
Construction Professional Services	Crown Commercial Service	named in the notice	£800,000,000
Cloud Compute	Crown Commercial Service	AWS EMEA SARL +14	£750,000,000
Programme and Project Partners (PPP Project) Lot 1 - Final Tender	CTM Portal for the NDA Shared Services Alliance	Kellogg Brown and Root Ltd	£750,000,000
Advanced Wound Care and Lymphoedema Products and Services	NHS Shared Business Services Ltd (NHS SBS)	named in the notice	£500,000,000
Business Operations Services Agreement	Transport for London	Capita Business Services Limited,	£426,166,667
Provision of OptiGene GenieHT machines and Covid-19 RT-LAMP Test Kits	Department of Health and Social Care	OptiGene Limited +1	£322,762,224
Infusion Pumps, Administration Sets and Associated Products	NHS Supply Chain	ALXR LIMITED +26	£320,000,000

Contracts published in December 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 December 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.