United Kingdom: Scottish Procurement and Commercial Directorate (SPCD)

The Scottish Procurement and Commercial Directorate (SPCD) tracks information in the Public Contracts Scotland (PCS) system, which is mandated in Scottish law to be used by all procuring entities to advertise all regulated procurement.

It is Scottish Law that all procurement over £50k and over for goods/services and £2m and over for works are advertised via PCS, as well as the subsequent awards. In addition, many organizations use PCS for direct requests for quotations (known as Quick Quotes) for lower values, non-regulated procurements.

Available formats:
JSON
Excel
CSV

Overview

Data date range:
Jan 2019 - Dec 2024
Update frequency:
Daily
Main language:
English
OCID prefix:
ocds-r6ebe6
License:
Open Government Licence v3.0

You are free to:

  • copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information;
  • adapt the Information;
  • exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application.

You must (where you do any of the above):

  • acknowledge the source of the information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and,
  • where possible, provide a link to this licence.
Publication policy:
-
Last retrieved:
Dec 2024 (retrieved monthly)
Retrieved from:
https://api.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/v1

Data available

A contracting process has several stages: tendering, awarding, contracting and implementation. You can learn about the contracting stages in this tutorial.

Parties

Count of parties:
501,201

Planning

Count of planning activities:
3,949

Tenders

Count of tenders:
44,389
Count of tenderers:
0
Count of tender items:
54,264

Awards

Count of awards:
45,906
Count of suppliers:
80,934
Count of award items:
6,278

Contracts

Count of contracts:
44,261
Count of contract items:
568
Count of transactions:
0

Documents

Count of documents:
162,533

Milestones

Count of milestones:
0

Amendments

Count of amendments:
2,275

Scotland produces their OCDS data via conversion from the TED / OJEU format following the instructions set out in the OCDS for the European Union Profile. They make use of the OCDS for the European Union Extension to publish this information.

Data quality

The dataset has quality issues to take into account, notably:

  • There are non-unique identifiers within the data at several key areas. For example there are sometimes contracting processes with two awards or multiple contracts which have the same identifier, and supplier or item identifiers may be non-unique within their scope.
  • There are sometimes organization references without associated entries in the parties array
  • There is a small number of blank or empty fields in the data which should not interfere with most use cases.

Last reviewed: Oct 2020

Access data

This OCDS dataset is available for download in JSON, Excel or CSV format. You can download the data for contracting processes in a specific year or for all time.

JSON

Each contracting process is represented as one line of JSON text in the .jsonl file.

The .jsonl file is compressed using Gzip. Windows users need 7-Zip, WinRAR or WinZip to decompress the .gz file.

Excel

Each contracting process is represented as one row in the main sheet. Other sheets link to it via the _link_main column.

Excel files can have at most 1,048,576 rows. If a year is missing, it had too many rows. Download the CSV files, instead.

CSV

Each contracting process is represented as one row in the main.csv file. Other files link to it via the _link_main column.

The .csv files are archived using tar and compressed using Gzip. Windows users need 7-Zip, WinRAR or WinZip to decompress the .tar.gz file.

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