Online Contracts Finder Available for Businesses.

THE online service will help companies to find public sector procurement tender and contract documents and aims to make the process ‘more welcoming’. Launching the initiative at the Treasury, Prime Minister, David Cameron stated: ‘We need to make the system much more open, more competitive and transparent’. The online tool will display all new procurement opportunities, tender documents and contracts for central government over £10,000 and will now be the main source of information for all firms looking to bid.  

The Prime Minister stated that his goal was to  ensure that at least 25 percent of all government contracts went to small to medium sized enterprises. He added that he was determined to remove the “ridiculous rules and bureaucracy” that had hitherto plagued the system and would also launch other measures to encourage more open competition. From May, further initiatives will be launched, such as breaking up larger contracts into smaller parts, encouraging more sub-contracting by major suppliers and holding an open procurement competition.

The service will provide access to live contract opportunities, including the full, daily OJEU/TED notices. In addition, firms will be able to view historical tender documents to examine contracts that have already been awarded, search across all notices without the need to register, sign-up for inclusion in a free supplier directory and download all notices in a XML or CSV format.

The service is free of charge and the site can be found here