Tom Pickup
Public contracts & procurement

What Lancashire is buying

Councils spend a large part of their 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.

The data comes from Contracts Finder, where public bodies must publish contracts and awards above roughly £25,000, covering the county council and all thirteen borough and city councils. It is a record of contracts awarded since 2015, not of every pound spent: day-to-day payments below the threshold, wages and grants are not here. The part that matters most for reorganisation is contract length: a long contract signed now is inherited by whichever new unitary takes over on 1 April 2028, whether it wants it or not. So this page leads on term, and on how many contracts are still running on handover day.

…
Contracts awarded
…
Value awarded (excluding framework ceilings)
…
Still running on handover day (1 Apr 2028)
…
Longest term awarded

Loading contracts…

Buyer & contractSupplierValueTermEnds
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 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.