UK procurement explained
Tender & Procurement Guides
Public sector bidding has its own vocabulary, its own portals and its own scoring mechanics. These guides explain how it works in practice for a UK small or medium-sized business: where notices are published, how evaluators award marks, how councils and NHS bodies buy, and what you need in place before you respond to your first tender.
Jobcentre support for starting a business
If you are claiming Universal Credit or another benefit and want to work for yourself, speak to your Jobcentre Plus work coach before spending money. Support can be available, but the old New Enterprise Allowance is no longer open to new participants. The useful question now is what current help applies to your circumstances, not what an old article says you could claim.
Read guide7 min readHow to find government contracts
UK public bodies spend roughly £300bn a year with suppliers, and almost all of it is advertised before it is awarded. The difficulty is not secrecy, it is fragmentation: there is no single national noticeboard that covers every contract in every nation at every value. Once you know which portal publishes what, and at which thresholds a notice becomes mandatory, finding relevant work becomes a routine weekly habit rather than a research project.
Read guide8 min readHow to win government contracts
Public procurement is a marking exercise, not a sales pitch. An evaluator sits with a scoring matrix, reads your answer against a published set of criteria, and awards a number. Bids that read beautifully but do not address the criteria score badly; bids that are plainly written but answer every element of the question score well. Understanding that mechanism is most of the job.
Read guide7 min readHow to bid for council contracts
Local government is the most accessible part of UK public procurement for a small or medium-sized supplier. Councils buy constantly, buy locally, and buy a lot of things at values low enough that national contractors do not chase them. They also publish more of their spending than most buyers, so with a little effort you can see who currently holds the work you want.
Read guide8 min readHow to bid for NHS contracts
The NHS is not one buyer. Trusts, integrated care boards, primary care organisations, national bodies and shared procurement hubs all purchase separately, and the rules that apply depend on what is being bought. The most important distinction to grasp early is between healthcare services for patients, which follow the Provider Selection Regime, and everything else, which follows mainstream public procurement law.
Read guide7 min readWhat is a tender?
A tender is a formal offer to supply goods, works or services at a stated price and on stated terms, submitted in response to an invitation from a buyer. In UK public procurement the word does double duty: it describes the document you submit and the whole competitive process that produced it. The vocabulary around it is where most newcomers get stuck, so here is what each term actually means.
Read guide7 min readHow to register for government contracts
Registration is free, takes an afternoon, and is the difference between hearing about contracts and being able to respond to them. The harder half of the job is being bid-ready: assembling the certificates, policies and figures that every selection questionnaire asks for, so that a three-week deadline is a writing task rather than a scramble for paperwork.
Read guide8 min readPublic Contracts Scotland
Public Contracts Scotland is the national portal where Scottish public bodies advertise their contracts, and it is free for suppliers to use. If you want to sell to Scottish councils, health boards, universities or the Scottish Government, this is the noticeboard you cannot skip. It sits alongside the UK-wide services rather than inside them, which is why suppliers who only watch Find a Tender or Contracts Finder quietly miss most public tenders Scotland has on offer.
Read guide8 min readThe Procurement Act 2023
The Procurement Act 2023 replaced the previous set of UK public procurement regulations with a single consolidated regime. For suppliers, the headline is not that everything changed, but that the shape of the process, the language used in notices and the amount of published information all shifted. This guide covers the structural changes. Because this is live legislation with detailed rules and guidance, confirm current specifics on gov.uk before you rely on them.
Read guide8 min readNHS Supply Chain
Selling to the NHS is not one route, it is at least three. There is the national catalogue operated through NHS Supply Chain, there are framework agreements run by national and regional buying organisations, and there are individual tenders run by trusts and integrated care boards. Suppliers waste months by aiming at the wrong one for what they sell.
Read guide8 min readFind a Tender
Find a Tender is the UK government's central service for publishing public contract notices, and since the Procurement Act 2023 regime came into force in February 2025 it carries far more than it used to. If you sell to the public sector and you have never opened it, you are almost certainly missing work that is sitting there in plain sight. This guide covers what appears on it, who is obliged to publish there, how to register and search without wasting your evenings, and how it fits alongside Contracts Finder and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish portals.
Read guide8 min readContracts Finder
Contracts Finder is where the smaller public contracts live, and it is the most useful portal in the country for a firm that has never won public work before. The contracts are modest, the competition is thinner, and buyers are often looking for a competent local supplier rather than a bid team. This guide covers what is published there, how it differs from Find a Tender, how to search it without losing your afternoon, and why a first small contract is worth more than its value suggests.
Read guide5 min readProactis
Proactis is procurement software, not a contract. If a council or a housing association has told you to register on Proactis before it will accept your quote, this page explains what you are actually signing up to and what happens next.
Read guide6 min readCrown Commercial Service
Crown Commercial Service is the government's own buying organisation, and a great deal of public spending flows through the agreements it puts in place rather than through one-off tenders. If you have been told the work you want sits on a CCS framework, this page explains what that means.
Read guide5 min readSell2Wales
Sell2Wales is the Welsh Government's portal for advertising public sector contract opportunities in Wales, and it is free for suppliers to use. If you deliver in Wales and you only watch the UK-wide services, you are missing the lower-value work that never leaves this portal.
Read guide4 min readDelta eSourcing
Delta eSourcing is an electronic tendering platform used by UK public sector buyers, and if one has asked you to register there it is because that is where its documents live and where your response has to be submitted.
Read guide4 min readIn-tend
In-tend is an electronic tendering platform used by UK public sector organisations, and suppliers usually meet it because a buyer has sent them a link to register before it will accept a bid.
Read guide4 min readBravoSolution
BravoSolution was an e-sourcing platform used by public sector buyers, and suppliers still search for it because older emails, bookmarks and tender documents refer to it by that name. It became part of JAGGAER, which is where the same technology now sits.
Read guide4 min readJAGGAER UK
JAGGAER UK is where a lot of public sector tendering now happens, particularly in higher education, and suppliers generally meet it because a buyer has asked them to register before submitting a bid.
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