Public contracts & procurement

What Lancashire's public sector is buying

The public sector spends a large part of its money through contracts with outside suppliers. By law those contracts are published. Here I bring the Lancashire ones together from the government's own procurement service into one searchable record, so you can see who is paid, how much, for what, and crucially for how long.

…

Contracts on record (all public bodies)

…

Value awarded (excluding framework ceilings)

…

Council contracts still running on handover day (1 Apr 2028)

…

Longest term awarded

Loading contracts…

Buyer & contract	Supplier	Value	Term	Ends

The data comes from Contracts Finder, where public bodies must publish contracts and awards above roughly £25,000. It starts with the bodies being reorganised: the county council and thirteen of Lancashire's fourteen borough, city and unitary councils. Ribble Valley published no qualifying contracts, so it does not appear. But councils are not the only public purse in Lancashire, and they are not the only landowner: the police, fire and ambulance services, the NHS, national agencies and the colleges and universities all hold estate here too. So this page now carries their contracts as well.

The distinction matters. Only the councils are abolished by reorganisation, so only their contracts pass to whichever new unitary takes over on 1 April 2028, whether it wants them or not. The police, fire, NHS and the rest are not reorganised; they keep their own contracts. So the handover figures above count the council contracts, while the wider bodies are shown as the public-sector landscape around them. Use the filter to move between them. As with any of this, the part that matters most for reorganisation is contract length, so the table leads on term and end date.

Sources and limits. Contracts are drawn from the Cabinet Office Contracts Finder, published under the Open Government Licence. This is a record of awarded contracts and framework agreements, which are commitments to spend, not confirmed payments, and it excludes spending below the publication thresholds. Figures are as published by each buyer; where a value was not published, none is shown. On coverage: the council record is comprehensive on Contracts Finder. The other bodies are matched by name, and their coverage is uneven: the NHS trusts and colleges publish most of their tenders elsewhere (Find a Tender and the NHS Atamis portal), so what is shown here is a floor, not their full procurement. National agencies such as National Highways and the Environment Agency have a large Lancashire estate but procure nationally, so only contracts with a clear Lancashire link are included, and there are few. Only the councils are abolished by reorganisation, so the "still running on handover day" figure counts council contracts alone. On contract length: the term shown is the published contract period. Contracts Finder has no structured field for extension options, so where a contract says "three years with the option of two more", it is flagged +opt, and where the wording is precise enough the maximum is shown as "up to 5y". Elsewhere the term is a floor: extensions only make a contract run longer, so the count still running on handover day is a conservative minimum. Frameworks are flagged because actual spend under them commonly outlives the stated term. Inclusion here is not a suggestion of any wrongdoing.