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A Domesday Book for public service contracts – better data, better value for money

Report type
Research and reports
Issue date
Data is neither shared nor transparent

Tendering is widely reported. Councils and departments publish details of what they pay external suppliers. But the columns of data are not linked together, nor is it prepared in standardised formats. A critical next phase – how contracts are carried out – is therefore missed. Either the data is not collected at all or not published.

As of now the initiation of contracts is visible in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) Tenders Electronic Daily . Cost thresholds are £118,133 for UK central government, £181,302 for other contracting bodies and £4,551,413 for public works contracts. Other contracts may still be visible on Contracts Finder . On this UK government website, Whitehall departments and agencies are required to advertise deals worth over £10,000. Other bodies are supposed to advertise contracts worth more than £25,000, but the picture is incomplete. The Institute for Government estimates that in 2018 only two in five tenders were published on Contracts Finder. [1] Leases are exempt from notification. Separate notification schemes apply in defence and in the devolved administrations. After April 2019, when the UK is to leave the EU, these arrangements will supposedly remain in place. The government says that with no agreement with the EU the fallback would be a UK specific e-notification service into which all contracts now published on OJEU/TED would go.

As well as these official sites, tender data is available – for a fee – from private sector sources. Tenders Direct , a division of the company Proactis, scans OJEU and other sources. Such data is primarily of use to would-be contractors. Reciprocal data about them – relevant to the contract decision – is much more dispersed or locked away, either inside companies themselves or conserved by consultants and auditors. Post- tender, data disappears into a black hole. Some private suppliers offer information, culled from annual reports and market intelligence, such as Tussell. Its clients can buy market analysis at a certain level of aggregation – for example, the number of public sector contracts held by a firm.

 

[1] Institute for Government (2018). “Government Procurement: the scale and nature of contracting in the UK” (forthcoming)

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