IN Brief:
- UK public procurement is worth around £400bn annually, according to the CMA.
- The regulator says losing-bid data is not routinely collected centrally in a machine-readable form.
- Its BRIT screening system is already generating enforcement leads from departmental procurement pilots.
The UK’s competition regulator wants public bodies to retain and combine more detailed tender data so suspicious bidding patterns can be screened across repeated procurement exercises rather than relying primarily on complaints, whistleblowers, or evidence uncovered during individual investigations.
The Competition and Markets Authority has published proposals examining public procurement and bid rigging, arguing that current data arrangements make systematic cartel detection harder because information on unsuccessful bids is often fragmented across contracting authorities or unavailable in a consistent machine-readable format.
UK public procurement is worth around £400bn each year. Research cited by the CMA indicates that collusive bidding can increase prices by 20% or more in affected tenders, while the regulator estimates that bid rigging could impose costs of between £1bn and more than £3bn on the UK economy.
The exact total is difficult to establish because successful collusion is designed to resemble competition. A procurement exercise can contain several apparently independent bids even when suppliers have agreed which company should win or how contracts should be divided.
Losing bids become useful enforcement data
Bid rigging can involve cover pricing, market allocation, bid rotation, or agreements between suppliers not to compete aggressively for particular contracts. Individual procurement officers may see only one competition at a time, making repeated patterns difficult to identify when the same businesses bid across several departments, regions, or frameworks.
The CMA’s Bid Rigging Intelligence Tool, known as BRIT, is designed to search tender information for anomalies and potentially suspicious behaviour. The regulator has piloted the system with public bodies including the Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Education, and Ministry of Justice, and says those exercises have already generated enforcement leads.
Unsuccessful bids are particularly valuable because they show how competing suppliers behaved, not simply who won. Price relationships, repeated participation, unusual withdrawal patterns, or the same companies consistently appearing around successful tenders can become more informative when examined across a large dataset.
The regulator says that losing-bid data is not routinely gathered centrally in a consistent machine-readable form. Information can remain dispersed across individual contracting organisations, procurement platforms, spreadsheets, and contract files, making cross-government analysis slower and less complete than it could be.
The proposed response is a broader procurement dataset containing information on successful and unsuccessful bids, contracts and subsequent amendments, subcontracting arrangements, and reliable identifiers for the suppliers involved. Commercially sensitive material would not need to be published openly to become useful for authorised analysis.
Standardisation is as important as volume. A large dataset has limited value if the same supplier appears under several names, contract descriptions cannot be compared, bid values use inconsistent fields, or information is stored in formats that require manual extraction before screening.
Defence procurement provides an early test
The Ministry of Defence is a significant area of interest because of the scale and complexity of its purchasing. Defence supply chains include major prime contractors, specialist manufacturers, engineering businesses, technology suppliers, maintenance providers, and smaller companies competing across long-running programmes and frameworks.
The CMA is exploring use of MoD procurement data and says work is progressing with the department on applying data-science techniques to bid-rigging detection. Comparable competition cases internationally have involved areas including military maintenance, uniforms, and munitions procurement.
More complete data also has value beyond cartel investigations. Procurement authorities can examine supplier concentration, repeated single-bid competitions, changes in participation, contract performance, and the extent to which individual markets depend on a small number of qualified providers.
The CMA’s wider procurement work argues that government buying decisions influence supplier investment, competition, market entry, innovation, and resilience. Poorly structured tenders can reinforce incumbent positions, while fragmented demand can make it difficult for new suppliers to justify investment in additional capability.
Large private purchasing organisations face similar data problems. Tender records, supplier master data, contract information, and pricing histories are often divided between business units, countries, procurement tools, and enterprise systems. Combining those records can expose market concentration or bidding behaviour that remains invisible when each contract is reviewed independently.
Analytical screening does not establish collusion by itself. Similar prices, limited bidder numbers, or repeated supplier combinations can arise for legitimate reasons in specialist markets where qualification requirements, geography, capacity, or technical standards limit competition.
BRIT and comparable systems are therefore screening mechanisms rather than automatic enforcement decisions. Their purpose is to identify tenders or supplier relationships that warrant closer investigation, after which conventional evidence is still needed to establish whether competitors have coordinated illegally.
The practical requirement is consequently less exotic than the technology might suggest: collect complete tender information, use consistent supplier identifiers, retain unsuccessful bids, and make the records analysable across organisational boundaries. With public purchasing measured at roughly £400bn annually, incomplete procurement data leaves both competition enforcement and market oversight working with only part of the transaction history.
