Archive

Wooden blocks spelling out 'VALUE'

Adding Value

We're analysts. We work with data, every day. We know what works and what doesn't work. We know about values that can't be summed, documents that are hard to find and buyers that use thirty or forty different versions of their name. We build data points that can be used. Our work isn't just about gathering all the data we ...
Details of a spreadsheet with categorisation

Algorithms That Are Better Than Humans

Categorisation is about making it easier to find opportunities. Getting it right means being better than humans. For it be really useful, we have to be able to take source documents and, where necessary improve on the categorisation provided by the publisher. If a publisher gives us a record that is classified as construction, that is useful, but if ...
Soldier on haunches receiving orders

Goodbye Defence Contracts Online

The Chief Commercial Officer of the Ministry of Defence has published details of planned changes to Defence Contracts Online. You can see his letter here. The planned replacement, Defence Sourcing Portal, is due to go live in January 2021, with Defence Contracts Online closing at some point during the second quarter of 2021. We will not lament the ...
Soldiers loading PPE into the back of an aeroplane

High priorities in PPE lead to missed opportunities

The NAO has just published a report criticising the government for using a 'high priority lane' where suppliers that were known to MPs were prioritised for public contracts for protective equipment, often at high values. Thread follows. https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ It isn't hard to see why this is a problem, good suppliers with a history of supplying PPE were ...
Map of Europe from the time of Charlemagne

The European Procurement Report. An Assessment

The data analysis from our recent report, An Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid, shows that the C-19 pandemic has affected procurement data across Europe. Publishing volumes for procurement data are generally down and data on Covid-19 procurement appears incomplete in most countries except for France and the UK. This is likely owing to the circumstances of ...
Front cover of our EU Covid-19 procurement report

European Procurement Around Covid-Our Data Analysis

Procurement data often uses CPV or Common Procurement Vocabulary codes as a classification of different notices. In creating the Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid report, we were able to analyse Covid-19 data by identifying CPV codes commonly associated with Covid-19 tenders and contracts. Although not all data publishers put CPV codes on notices, where notices do not ...
Covid-19 home test kit

Review All Open Covid Contracts Here

In October, we openly published all the contracts let by the UK public sector around Covid. In light of today's report by the National Audit Office on their Investigation into government procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic, we thought it useful to share our portal again, with all available published data on government contracts around Covid. The table is ...
World map showing infection hotspots for Covid

EU Government Procurement- Procedure Type

In our Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid report, we sought to determine the extent to which different countries relied on direct contract awards, those contracts that were let without any competitive process. Research* has previously indicated that contracts that were let by direct awards are 10% more expensive than those let by competitive processes. Direct awards are ...
Front cover of our EU Covid-19 procurement report

New Covid Procurement Report Launches Today.

We are pleased today to launch our latest report, An Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid. The first wave of Covid-19 in Spring 2020, brought about unprecedented stresses and challenges to modern public procurement systems. To remove barriers and ensure the fact procurement of critical goods, governments throughout European states implemented emergency procurement regulations. These regulations generally ...

Government Procurement Rises as UK Heads Back into Lockdown

Recently, we published a very important data set. All known government medical equipment and protective clothing contracts were published and can be found here. This data updates daily and is completely free for anyone who wants to monitor government contracts. Since 12th October there has been a significant rise in the number of contracts for Covid related ...

UK Soon To Join WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement

On the 7th October 2020, the WTO's Government Procurement Act (GPA) members granted the UK the right to submit its GPA instrument of accession to the Committee in 2021. This means the UK will join the GPA in its own right once the EU member transition periods ends on 31st December 2020. What's The WTO Government Procurement Act? The ...

Finding Beneficiaries of Public Money

By Alex Yeung. Part 1: The Matching Process Linking entities is a common theme in procurement data, but it is a significant problem in the UK. The concern with entity matching is the cost of false positives. This issue is particularly stark when finding the beneficiaries of money. The main challenge is that name matching is largely insufficient ...

Can Anyone Do Business With Government?

By Fiona Hunt It’s understandable that for many SME’s, doing business with government is not high on their prospecting list. In the media, most of the coverage around government suppliers tends to be about big consultancies and major multinational technology companies. It’s understandable then that many smaller businesses would consider becoming a supplier to government highly unlikely. The ...
Wooden blocks spelling out 'VALUE'

New Government Measures Include Social Value in Procurement

  In late September 2020, the UK Government released a new plan for delivering greater social value through its procurement processes. The new measures come into place in January 2021, and have lofty goals including jobs growth, greater prosperity through broad economic growth, and even tackling climate change. These measures will be introduced through a new model for government ...

Consultancy contracts published

Today we're publishing all of the recent consultancy contracts for the UK. This data is free to download and reuse. There has been high levels of interest in the roles that larger consultancies are playing in the delivery of the 'Test and Trace' service here in the UK, so we've decided to publish all of the data ...

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