2.6 Contracts Finder is an online portal that brings most of government's published contracting opportunities together in one place. The government has committed to making its data more transparent and sees Contracts Finder as a way of meeting this commitment. Contracts Finder shows:
• contract opportunities above £10,000 that are open for tenders;
• planned work that will lead to contract opportunities in the future; and
• previous tenders and awarded contracts (including a copy of the contract).
2.7 Contracts Finder was re-built in 2015, to improve its search function and ensure the design could be updated more easily in the future. For most contracts, public bodies are now required to use it under public procurement regulations.11
2.8 Contracts Finder brings together data from over 200 procurement portals. Some data are automatically uploaded into the system, but most portals require public bodies to manually add it to Contracts Finder. We found gaps in the data it holds. For example:
• contract opportunities: the Cabinet Office identified 56 central government open contract opportunities on the European Union's contracting portal that it would have expected to find on Contracts Finder. It was only possible to find 45 (80%) of these on Contracts Finder.
• published awards: of 3,474 contract award notices on Contracts Finder as of July 2015, only 1,523 of these notices (44%) included links to published documents. We were not able to link published award notices to previously-advertised contract opportunities.
2.9 Contracts Finder provides some transparency over public procurement, but is limited in its scope. The CCS issued guidance in July 2015 relating to the transparency of government contract information, such as pricing and incentives, performance metrics and governance arrangements.12 Contracts Finder is not currently set up to hold this sort of information and it is not yet clear where contracting authorities are expected to publish it.
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11 The Public Contracts Regulations 2015: Section 110, February 2015 does not require all contracts to be advertised on Contracts Finder, for example single tender actions. Some public bodies are exempt from the requirements, such as academies, maintained schools and NHS bodies.
12 Crown Commercial Service, Procurement Policy Note - Increasing the Transparency of Contract Information to the Public Action Note 13/15 31 July 2015. Available at: www.gov.uk/government/publications/procurement-policy-note-1315-increasing-the-transparency-of-contract-information