Outsourcing Contracts and Tenders

Public sector buyers use the term for three fairly distinct things: business process outsourcing such as payroll, HR administration, recruitment processing and customer services; clinical outsourcing, where an NHS trust buys in surgery, pathology or imaging capacity from a private provider to clear a backlog; and IT outsourcing, where infrastructure, service desk or network support passes to a single supplier under a long-term deal.

Stotles brings together outsourcing tenders and contracts from 100+ portals into one search, so you do not have to check each portal separately, and you can set alerts for new opportunities across the UK and Ireland.

If you want to search the government portals directly, Find a Tender carries higher-value contracts across the UK and Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland's eTenders covers Irish public bodies, and many councils, NHS bodies and housing associations publish on their own e-tendering portals such as ProContract. Business process outsourcing is often called off the Government Commercial Agency outsourced services framework, and clinical outsourcing is let under the Provider Selection Regime.

Outsourcing suppliers handling personal data must comply with UK data protection law, and clinical providers must be registered with the Care Quality Commission. Tenders usually set minimum insurance cover, check financial standing and ask for evidence of similar services at selection stage. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can be excluded for certain criminal convictions, insolvency or failure to pay tax.

Often. Crown Commercial Service's Outsourced Services framework and several NHS and local authority business process outsourcing agreements turn up repeatedly alongside one-off, single-supplier deals.

Clinical outsourcing is let under the Provider Selection Regime, including direct awards; business process work runs as panels, single-supplier deals or call-offs from the Crown Commercial Service Outsourced Services framework. NHS trusts, NHS England, central government departments and utilities are the buyers of outsourced services.

Read corporate strategies, service reviews, commissioning plans and expiry dates for existing contracts, which show outsourcing work coming due ahead of a notice. On Stotles you can track those signals and the buyers behind them, then follow a notice from pre-tender through to award.

Outsourcing has no CPV code of its own. Notices carry the code of the service being outsourced, for example 85100000 (Health services) for outsourced clinical pathways, and many carry no CPV code at all.