What a buyer spends
A council, trust or department's awarded contracts over five years: totals by year, by category from cleaning to construction to care, and the suppliers who win them.
Data desk
Working on a story? We'll run the numbers.
BidSkim holds 800,000+ UK public procurement notices from the four official sources, deduplicated and connected to five years of award history. If your story touches public money, email a question and get the figure, the method and the source notices back the same day. Free, no strings beyond a credit.
What we can answer
Questions the public record can settle.
340,000+ published contract awards over five years, worth over £1.2 trillion where values are recorded. Every one names a buyer and a winner, which makes spending questions answerable.
Who the money goes to
The split of a buyer's or sector's spend across smaller companies and national or multinational groups, and how much stays with local firms, where the public record supports the classification.
What a supplier has been paid
Recorded public-sector income for a named company: which buyers, how much, over which years, across councils, the NHS and central government.
Where a company works in government
A supplier's public-sector footprint: which parts of government they serve, in which regions, in which categories, and how that has changed over five years.
What similar work costs
Published values for comparable awarded contracts, so a quoted figure can be put in context.
A specific notice, explained
What a tender or award notice actually says, what it omits, and how it compares with the buyer's history.
How it works
Same-day turnaround, sources included.
- Email [email protected] with the question and your deadline. Working-day requests are answered the same day.
- You get the figure, a plain-English note on how it was computed, and links to the underlying official notices so you can verify everything independently.
- Attribution: credit the data to BidSkim, ideally as a link to bidskim.com. That is the whole price.
- If we cannot answer confidently from the public record, we say so rather than stretching the data.
- Corrections: if we ever get a number wrong, tell us and we will correct it publicly.
Methodology
Where the numbers come from.
Every figure is computed from published official records, and the limits are stated with the number.
- Sources: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, checked daily and deduplicated so one contract appears once.
- Values come from published award notices. Where a value is missing or implausible it is excluded and the coverage is stated.
- Framework agreements and their call-offs are counted separately from ordinary contracts, because mixing them inflates totals.
- Company size and locality splits are computed from the flags, registered addresses and company records the notices and public registries carry. Coverage varies, and every such figure comes with its coverage stated.
Who you're dealing with
A human.
BidSkim is built and run by Seamus White. Happy to verify by video call, and quotable on the record on UK procurement data. No AI-written statistics: every figure handed to a journalist is computed from the notices and checked by a person.