Want to know who won a public contract? The chances are that you never will.

Nov. 9, 2017, 6 a.m. by HelenMcNally

Caleb Roenigk_Flickr

The public never gets to know who won more than 50% of tenders published by Local Government and the NHS according to data on Contracts Finder, the Government’s tender portal. Across the whole of Government 43% of tenders do not have a contract award even though publishing contract award data is a legal requirement.¹

Using data taken from Contracts Finder, we have counted up all the tenders that had deadlines more than a year ago and yet are still missing contract award notices. However, because the public sector often uses frameworks, contracts that can be used multiple times by different buyers, the number of contract awards should actually exceed the number of tenders. This means that there are far more contract awards missing, we just can’t know how many.

Central government had the best response rate, publishing 81% of its contract awards. Local government and the NHS fared less well, publishing 48% and 43% of their contract awards respectively. The worst performers were procurement organisations.* These bodies conduct procurement on behalf of multiple public sector buyers, often within a region or a specific sector. Despite being procurement specialists and publishing a high volume of tenders, on average 7 tenders per month, these organisations only published 60% of contract awards.

Of the buyers who published over 20 tenders, 11 have published no contract awards and only 11 have published a contract award for every tender.

Buyers with no contract awards:

Buyers with an award for every tender:

Buyers with the highest number of missing contract awards:

16 buyers published more than 500 tenders. These buyers published 80% of their contract awards in total, but two of them were missing 70% of their contract award notices:

Conclusions

There is a significant shortfall in the publishing of contract awards and the failure to publish is widespread. Publishing rates vary significantly across different types of buying organisation, which indicates that 100% publishing could be attained, were buyers sufficiently motivated to publish this data. Clearly the legal mandate to publish is insufficient to improve publishing rates.

Perhaps it is time to consider introducing a law similar to the one adopted in Slovakia where a contract is invalid unless openly published within three months of being signed.² This law has had a positive impact on corruption, saving public money while improving the business climate. The data has been used by citizens, journalists and public servants, thereby  improving transparency.

Methodology

This analysis was conducted on the 1st and 2nd of November, 2017. We gather tender and contract data from the Contracts Finder API daily. To begin this analysis, we counted the  tenders published on Contracts Finder and contract awards linked to the original tender on Contracts Finder, 365 days after the original tender was published, covering the period from March 2014 to October 2016. We linked this to public sector entities and added buyer types to all these entities that had published over 20 tenders in the period analysed.

*Procurement Organisations