month in review
UK public procurement in January 2022
6,895 UK public sector tenders and contract awards were published in January 2022 by 1,482 buying organisations, 7% up on December 2021. 6% of those with a recorded route to market were awarded directly, without competition.
most active buyers
- UK Shared Business Services Limited171
- UK Research and Innovation163
- Ministry of Defence154
- Ministry of Justice135
- Defra Network eTendering Portal129
- Cumbria County Council122
- National Highways113
- Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office87
- London Borough of Haringey87
- Defence Science and Technology Laboratory80
who won most
- Hays Specialist Recruitment Ltd31
- Softcat PLC23
- Computacenter (UK) Limited22
- Aecom21
- Deloitte LLP21
- Insight Direct (UK) Ltd19
- Dell Corporation Limited18
- Emiran HealthCare18
- Hays IT18
- Chiltern Healthcare17
biggest changes on December 2021
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 | December 2021 | January 2022 | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ministry of Justice | 57 | 135 | +78 |
| Health & Safety Executive | 5 | 71 | +66 |
| Surrey County Council | 114 | 56 | -58 |
| University of the West of England | 4 | 59 | +55 |
| Cumbria County Council | 69 | 122 | +53 |
| Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport | 1 | 50 | +49 |
| Department for Education | 85 | 37 | -48 |
| National Highways | 72 | 113 | +41 |
| Defence Science and Technology Laboratory | 42 | 80 | +38 |
| Milton Keynes City Council | 43 | 79 | +36 |
what was bought
- business and professional services 1,015
- construction work 756
- health and social care 688
- IT services 507
- architecture and engineering 434
- software and information systems 343
- research and development 330
- education and training 309
- transport services 274
- waste, cleaning and environment 196
the biggest awarded contracts of January 2022
Contracts published in January 2022 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 January 2022 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.