month in review

UK public procurement in April 2023

8,050 UK public sector tenders and contract awards were published in April 2023 by 1,482 buying organisations, 10% down on March 2023. 10% of those with a recorded route to market were awarded directly, without competition.

notices

8,050

buyers

1,482

named a winner

6,479

awarded directly

10%

median value

£104,997

most active buyers

who won most

biggest changes on March 2023

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	March 2023	April 2023	change
Hee	4	272	+268
Bristol City Council	56	241	+185
Department of Health and Social Care	23	172	+149
Cumbria County Council	223	83	-140
UK Shared Business Services Limited	234	117	-117
UK Health Security Agency	54	166	+112
Ministry of Defence	277	173	-104
Newcastle University	18	112	+94
NHS Property Services Limited	84	17	-67
UK Research and Innovation	177	111	-66

what was bought

the biggest awarded contracts of April 2023

contract	buyer	won by	value
Southern Integrated Delivery (SID) - B&C and E&P	Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd	Octavius Infrastructure Limited +1	£5,300,000,000
Generation 3 Construction Framework	The Wheatley Housing Group Limited	Ashleigh (Scotland) Limited +7	£500,000,000
Patient Transport Service	NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board	named in the notice	£472,000,000
GB-Leeds: Digital Playground	BIP SOLUTIONS LIMITED	Fuzzy Duck Creative Ltd	£400,000,000
Integrated Health and Wellbeing Services to Prisons in the South West region	NHS England	Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust +1	£273,134,000
NHS Education contract with Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust	HEE	Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust	£201,207,090
NHS Education contract with Barts Health NHS Trust	HEE	Barts Health NHS Trust	£200,906,421
Consultancy Services	LHC Procurement Group Limited for the Welsh Procurement Alliance (WPA)	127 Joint Venture Limited +72	£200,000,000
ORTHOTIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES (INCLUDING PROSTHETIC SERVICES) (SBS10247)	NHS Shared Business Services	Ability Matters Group +29	£200,000,000
Software Value Added Reseller Services	Scottish Government	Computacenter (UK) Ltd	£200,000,000

Contracts published in April 2023 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 2023 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.