For councils
Know what your neighbours are buying before you write the spec
Local authorities use procurement intelligence differently from suppliers. You are rarely bidding. You are buying, and the useful questions are about the market rather than the opportunity: who else has bought this recently, what did they pay, which suppliers are actually active in this category, and when do comparable contracts come up elsewhere.
All of that is public, published in award notices across the country, and almost never assembled into a usable form when a category manager needs it.
What councils use it for
Three jobs, one dataset
Market engagement before procurement
Before going out to market, see which suppliers hold comparable contracts with comparable authorities, and at what value. A grounded shortlist beats a framework catalogue and a hopeful notice.
Benchmarking what you pay
Award values for similar contracts at similar authorities are published. Comparing them is straightforward once the data is in one place, and awkward when it is spread across four portals.
Forward pipeline across directorates
Contracts expiring in the next 18 months, across your own authority and others, so re-procurement is planned rather than triggered by an expiry date nobody diarised.
Structure
A radar per directorate, not one for the whole council
Highways, adult social care, children's services, waste, digital and regeneration have almost nothing in common in procurement terms. Their categories differ, their value bands differ and their supplier markets differ entirely.
Running one radar per directorate means each category team sees a digest that is genuinely theirs, while central procurement keeps a view across all of them from a single login. Each additional radar is £30 per month, with no per user charge on top.
- Own keywords, CPV codes and value bands per directorate
- Named target authorities to watch as comparators
- Named suppliers tracked for contract expiry
- Recipients managed by each team, not by IT
- Central admin view across every radar
- On-demand reports on what each radar has surfaced
Comparators
Watch the authorities you actually compare yourself to
Statistical neighbours matter more than geographic ones. A unitary authority planning a leisure contract learns more from three comparable unitaries elsewhere in England than from the county next door. Name the authorities you want tracked and their notices and awards are surfaced specifically, alongside a profile of what they buy and who from.
For combined authorities and shared service arrangements, the same mechanism works across constituent councils, giving a single view of activity that would otherwise need collating by hand from several portals.
On the data
Public information, properly assembled
Everything here is published under the Open Government Licence by the authorities themselves. Tender Radar does not hold commercially confidential information and does not need access to your systems. It collects what is already public, resolves inconsistent organisation names across four portals, and keeps the history so expiry dates remain visible long after the notice has scrolled off the front page.
Every figure in a report can be traced back to the source notice it came from, which matters when the number is going into a committee paper.
Try it on a category you are about to re-procure
Pick one contract coming up for renewal, set a radar against that category, and see whether the market picture it produces is one you could have assembled otherwise.
30 days free. No card required to start.