Police Tenders and Contracts

Two ways in. Watch individual forces and BlueLight Commercial's own tenders and frameworks as they open, or move earlier by tracking a force's budget and strategy documents before a competition starts. Policing procurement runs force by force rather than through one buyer, so watching the Metropolitan Police alone tells you nothing about what Police Scotland or a county constabulary is planning next. On Stotles you can follow the specific forces you sell to and build a bid from there.

No single body buys for UK policing. Individual forces, their police and crime commissioners and chief constables each run their own procurement, covering everything from custody drug testing to fleet livery and IT systems. BlueLight Commercial runs collaborative national frameworks that forces can call off against, such as BLC0339 for drug testing on arrest, but a force is free to run its own competition instead. That is why this page mixes London-wide contracts with small county-level ones side by side.

All of them, not just one. The corpus behind this page mixes the Metropolitan Police and the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority, West Midlands Police, and English and Welsh forces such as Durham, Suffolk, Sussex, Warwickshire and Devon and Cornwall. A sample of 50 recent notices returned dozens of different buying organisations, so no single force accounts for more than a tenth of what is on record here.

Two show up consistently across the corpus behind this page: 75241100 (Police services) and 45216000 (Construction work for buildings relating to law and order or emergency services and for military buildings), the second covering police station refurbishment and new-build work specifically. Most individual contracts sit under more general codes for IT, catering, fleet and construction, reflecting whatever a police buyer happens to be running rather than a policing-specific code.

37 tenders are open now, out of 8,504 notices on record across the search terms this page runs on. Most of what is on record, 4,423 notices, is already awarded, and a further 871 sit at pre-tender stage, meaning a force has signalled a competition before formally opening it.