How BidSkim counts public sector contracts

The unit on every page is a contract awarded: one procurement that reached an award. A procurement often has several notices, such as a tender notice, an award notice and later changes. We count it once.

The same procurement can appear on more than one of the four sources. We merge the copies and count it once. A framework or dynamic purchasing system is a route to buy, not a contract, so the framework itself is not counted. Contracts awarded through it, the call-offs, are.

A contract is dated by its award date. When a notice gives no award date we use the award notice's date, and failing that the date it was published. Future dates never count.

Buyer and supplier pages show the last 24 months of awards to the date the figures were refreshed, with the latest 12 months used for some lists. Service pages show the last 24 months to the latest date by which every contract awarded has been assigned to its services, so a service page is never based on a partly assigned period. Until a service's full 24 months are assigned, its page shows the last 12 months and says so. BidSkim holds 5 years of records.

A supplier is credited with every contract its name appears on as a winner. Several suppliers can share one contract, so supplier totals added together are larger than the number of contracts. Suppliers are named as they appear on the official notices.

A recorded value is the value published on the notice. It often covers the whole term of a contract, extensions included, and it is often an estimate. It is not money paid, so we never call it spend.

Beside every total we say how many contracts have a published value, and we lead with the median contract. A handful of very large contracts can dominate a total, while the median shows what a typical contract is worth.

A service total adds up only the contracts where that service is the main thing bought, so the same money is never counted under two services.

Buyers label each notice with a CPV code from a list that dates from 2008. Those codes cannot tell you what was actually bought. One code, 48000000 for software packages and information systems, covers 352 different services in our catalogue, from NHS e-rostering to legal case management software. In 29% of the contracts we have assigned so far (24,170 of 82,252), the CPV code points to a different industry from the work the notice describes: a housing communal-area cleaning contract coded as building repair, or a country-park path resurfacing coded as road-building materials.

Keywords miss work too, because buyers describe the same work in different ways. A grounds maintenance contract might be called green space management, horticultural services or grass cutting.

So BidSkim reads the full notices for each contract across its life, from planning and tender through to award, and assigns it to services from our own catalogue of about 2,000 services in 18 industries. The catalogue goes well below CPV level. SEND home-to-school transport is separate from mainstream school transport, coroner body removal is separate from other funeral services, and running a leisure centre is separate from building one.

Each contract gets one main service, and further services only when it buys materially separate things, such as cleaning and security in one contract. A service page counts every contract that bought the service. Its values, median and example contracts use only the contracts where it was the main service. Buyer and supplier pages group contracts by service once their period is fully assigned, and until then by CPV division.

A buyer gets a page after 25 contracts awarded in 24 months. A supplier needs 25 contracts won and an official identifier, such as a Companies House number, a charity number or a public body code. A service needs 50 contracts in 24 months. We never publish a page about a named individual.

A page that falls below 15 contracts (30 in 24 months for a service) at two monthly checks stays online, so links and citations keep working, but it is no longer recommended on other pages. When an organisation is renamed, merged or succeeded, its old address redirects to the current page.

Different sites can report different numbers for the same buyer or market. The usual reasons are these.

• Notices or contracts. A site that counts notices counts one procurement several times, once for each tender, award and change notice. We count contracts.
• One source or four. A site that reads only one notice service misses contracts published elsewhere. A site that adds sources without merging them counts some contracts twice.
• Name variants. Buyers and suppliers appear under many spellings. Where the variants are not merged, one organisation's contracts are split across several records.
• Framework ceilings counted as spend. A framework's advertised ceiling can run to billions of pounds and is shared by many suppliers over years. Counting it as a contract value inflates totals. We leave ceilings out.
• Values and payments. Published values describe contracts, not money paid. Spending data from a buyer's own accounts measures something else.

When a published figure was wrong, we correct it and record the correction here. To report an error, write to [email protected].

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These pages are compiled by BidSkim Limited. The method is owned by Seamus White, BidSkim's founder. For press and data requests, see data for journalists.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.