Sources and licences
- Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and Public Contracts Scotland (UK): contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Government Commercial Agency (formerly Crown Commercial Service) agreement pages, for the name, end date and type of a national agreement that call-offs give only by its number, such as RM6126: contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Area boundaries on the free reports’ maps: Office for National Statistics, International Territorial Levels (January 2025), licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0; contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.
- TED, the EU's public procurement journal, for Irish notices above EU thresholds: © European Union, reused under the TED legal notice.
- Ireland's Office of Government Procurement open data on data.gov.ie: contains Irish Public Sector Data licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
We read the tender sources through their official APIs and files, so tenders never come from scraping websites. The Government Commercial Agency has no API for its agreements. So about once a month we read the public page of each agreement that call-offs name by its number, one page at a time, and nothing else on its site. Notices are shown as their buyers published them. Tenderhooks is unofficial and not affiliated with any of these bodies.
What we cover, and what we don't yet
- Covered: UK notices on Find a Tender, from all four nations; England's notices on Contracts Finder; and Scotland's on Public Contracts Scotland, including those below the UK-wide thresholds. A notice published on more than one of these sites is shown once.
- Wales: tenders of £30,000 or more also reach Find a Tender, which we read (Procurement Act 2023, section 87, from 24 February 2025). Tenders under £30,000 appear only on Sell2Wales, which we can't read yet.
- Northern Ireland: notices below the UK-wide thresholds on eTendersNI are not covered, because it has no open data feed.
- Ireland: not yet. When we add it, TED and Ireland's open data above will be its sources; national notices below EU thresholds reach the open data up to three months late.
So we never claim to cover every UK and Irish tender.
Personal data in public notices
Public notices sometimes name people: a buyer's contact person, or a sole trader who won a contract. Under GDPR and UK GDPR article 14, here is what we do with that data.
- Contact details: we remove the names, emails and phone numbers of contact people when a notice arrives.
- Winners: we show winning suppliers only if they are companies or other organisations (legal persons), only to signed-in customers, and never on public pages or in emails, except when we write to a firm about its own award. A winner that looks like an individual is stored as "supplier name withheld", with a reference that is different in every tender and no address or registration. We keep that award's facts, such as value, dates, size of business and number of bids, for market figures. The official notice still names that person, so we treat these facts as personal data, and you can object (see below).
- Names in descriptions: a name a buyer writes inside a description may remain as published, unless you object (see below).
- AI summaries: the title, buyer and description of research and consulting notices, including any name left in a description, go to Anthropic (United States) to write a summary. See Subprocessors.
- Why, and the legal basis: to tell businesses about public contracts and how they were awarded (legitimate interests, and the openness the procurement rules require).
- Source: the official sources above.
- How long: notices as we fetched them, with contact details already removed: 90 days, so we can process them again when we improve how we read them. Processed notices and award history (from October 2024): up to 10 years. One separate copy of that history, also without contact details, is kept for the same time so we can rebuild it.
- Controller: Tenderhooks (the provider named in our legal notice).
Your rights, and how to object
If a notice we show includes personal data about you, you can ask for access, correction or deletion, and you can object. To object, use Your data and complaints or email privacy@tenderhooks.co.uk, with the link to the notice (or its title and buyer) and what you want removed. We reply within one month. If we agree, we remove it from Tenderhooks, including AI summaries, and keep it removed when the notice is updated. We can't recall emails already sent, and our encrypted backups keep an older copy for about a month. The official notice stays as its buyer published it. To keep your name out, we keep a one-way code of it (never the name) and our reference for as long as we keep that notice, so it stays removed. You can also complain to the CNPD (Portugal) or the ICO (UK). More in our privacy notice.