Finding contracts before they are re-tendered

The problem with reading tender notices

Watching for new notices feels like the obvious way to find work. It is also the latest possible moment to arrive.

A public sector re-tender has a long private history before it becomes a notice. Someone reviews the current service, decides to renew or replace it, scopes what is needed, often speaks to the incumbent about what has and has not worked, writes a specification, gets it approved and then publishes.

If your first contact with that process is the published notice, you are responding to a document shaped by other people's conversations, on a three-week clock, against a supplier who has been part of it for months.

Award notices tell you when

When a contract is awarded, the notice commonly publishes the contract end date. That single field turns a future competition into a known date.

It means the re-tender for a five-year contract awarded in 2024 is visible now, in public data, to anyone who looks. Almost nobody does, because the information sits in award notices, which most suppliers ignore as a record of a competition they already lost.

How often does the incumbent actually lose?

The received wisdom is that you should not bother competing against an incumbent. If that were true, no public contract would ever change hands. So we measured it against our own award data.

Taking contracts where the same buyer awarded the same named contract again at least six months later, where a single supplier was named each time, and where the two awards are not call-offs under a framework: 754 re-tenders since 2021, and 230 of them, 30.5%, went to a different supplier.

Close to a third. Incumbency is an advantage, not a lock, and treating it as a lock is why a good many capable firms never bid at all.

What to do with a date

A date twelve to eighteen months out is not a sales opportunity yet. It is a research opportunity that becomes a sales opportunity.

1. Read the original award. Value, duration, lot structure, who won, what the specification covered. That tells you what the buyer thought they needed last time and roughly what they paid.
2. Work out whether it is contestable. An incumbent performing well on a service the buyer is happy with is a poor target. A service that has visibly struggled, or a specification that is clearly dated, is a good one.
3. Make contact before the procurement starts. Ask what they are planning, offer to take part in market engagement, and be useful about the problem rather than pitching your product.
4. Be ready when it lands. Having your evidence, references and pricing straight before the notice appears is worth more than any amount of speed afterwards.

Where the line is on contact

This matters, so be clear about it. Talking to a buyer before a procurement begins is normal and encouraged: buyers run market engagement events for exactly this reason, and a supplier who helps them understand what the market can do is doing them a favour.

Once a competition is live, the rules change completely. Use only the communication route named in the tender documents, usually the portal messaging function, and do not approach evaluators. The two situations are different, and knowing which one you are in is the whole of the etiquette.

Getting in early: the signals before a tender

An end date tells you when. These tell you a buyer has started, and each is a chance to be heard before the specification is fixed.

• Preliminary market engagement notices. Under the Procurement Act 2023 a buyer that has engaged the market before a tender must publish a preliminary market engagement notice, or explain in the tender notice why it did not (section 17). A notice inviting suppliers to a market day, a questionnaire or one-to-one meetings is an open invitation: answer it.
• Pipeline notices. A buyer expecting to spend more than £100 million in the coming financial year must publish a pipeline of planned procurements within 56 days of the year starting (section 93). For the largest councils, NHS bodies and departments, that is a year's notice of what is coming.
• Requests for information and soft market testing. Short questionnaires about how the market would approach a need. Answering well costs an hour and puts your thinking in front of the people writing the specification.
• Supplier and meet the buyer events. Councils, NHS bodies and business support organisations run them, and the people who attend are often the people who will buy.

The law expects buyers to keep this fair: market engagement must not give any supplier an unfair advantage (section 16). That works in your favour as a newcomer. What you share is meant to shape the requirement, so be useful: explain what the market can offer, where the last specification was narrow, and how lots or outcomes could open it to smaller suppliers.

Doing this without a subscription

All of it is public. You can search award notices on Contracts Finder and Find a Tender, filter by category and buyer, and record end dates in a spreadsheet. For a handful of target buyers that is genuinely workable, and worth doing before paying anyone.

It stops being workable at scale, because end dates are scattered across four portals and hundreds of thousands of notices, buyer names are spelled inconsistently, and framework values distort any attempt to rank by size. That is the gap tools exist to fill, ours included.

• Browse what is coming on our expiring contracts pages, by year.
• Look up a specific organisation on the buyer pages to see what they hold and when it ends.
• Check a competitor on the supplier pages to see which of their contracts are coming up.

One caveat worth keeping

Not every award notice publishes an end date, and some that do are wrong or get extended. Any count of expiring contracts is a floor, not a complete picture, and a date should be treated as a strong signal rather than a diary entry.

It is still the most useful under-used information in UK public procurement, precisely because it is hiding in plain sight.