UK Procurement Frameworks Explained: G-Cloud, DPS, and Open Tender

When design and digital agencies try to win public sector work, most of them default to one approach: wait for an open tender to appear on a procurement portal, find it (or not), then write a bid. That works — but it's only one of three main routes buyers use. The agencies consistently winning government contracts understand all three routes and pick the right one for each opportunity.

This guide explains how the three routes work, what they mean for agencies your size, and how to know when an opportunity is on a framework you don't have access to.

The three routes to UK public sector contracts

1. Open tender (competitive procurement via FTS or Contracts Finder)

This is what most agencies think of when they hear "public sector contract." A buyer publishes a notice — usually an Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Request for Proposals (RFP) — on Find a Tender Service (FTS) or, for older contracts, Contracts Finder. Any eligible supplier can respond.

What this means in practice:

• Visible to everyone, including your competitors
• Higher investment to respond (bidding an open tender for a £150k contract can take 2–4 days of BD time)
• Evaluators are scoring blind — your relationship with the buyer counts for very little
• Can be accessed without any pre-approval or framework registration

Under the Procurement Act 2023 (in force since February 2025), all new procurements above a set threshold must be published on FTS. Below-threshold contracts are increasingly published there too. If you're not watching FTS, you're missing the majority of new public sector work.

2. Framework agreements (call-off contracts)

A framework agreement is a pre-approved supplier list established by a central body — Crown Commercial Service (CCS), NHS Shared Business Services, YPO, or the buyer themselves. To win work through a framework, a buyer issues a "further competition" (sometimes called a mini-competition or call-off) between the suppliers already on the framework.

The two most relevant frameworks for design and digital agencies:

Other relevant frameworks:

• NHS Shared Business Services Digital Services framework — for NHS-facing work
• Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation (YPO) and local authority frameworks — regional buyers often prefer framework suppliers
• Buyer-specific frameworks — larger councils and NHS trusts sometimes establish their own frameworks

Once you're on a framework, you're in a shortlist. You still have to win the further competition, but you're competing against a smaller number of pre-qualified agencies, and buyers can move faster because the governance is simpler. The downside: if you're not on the framework, you're locked out regardless of how good your work is.

3. Dynamic Purchasing Systems (DPS)

A DPS is similar to a framework but with one critical difference: new suppliers can join at any point during the life of the system. Buyers publish call-off opportunities, and any registered supplier can bid. You don't have to wait for an application window.

DPS contracts are common in:

• Local government (councils running digital transformation programmes)
• NHS trusts and integrated care boards
• Central government departments running ongoing digital service improvement work

How to join a DPS:

1. Find the DPS via FTS or the buyer's procurement portal (the DPS operator publishes a notice that the system is open for new entrants)
2. Submit a qualification questionnaire demonstrating your eligibility (typically turnover, insurance, relevant experience)
3. Once accepted, you receive all call-off notices and can bid on each one

The catch: some DPS systems were set up years ago and are poorly publicised. Suppliers who joined early have built relationships and win more call-offs. But this is changing under the Procurement Act 2023, which requires buyers to be more transparent about DPS opportunities and easier to access.

The problem most agencies don't notice

Here's where agencies lose out without realising it: a tender appears on FTS, they read the notice, start preparing a bid — and then discover, halfway through the documents, that it's a call-off under a framework they're not on.

This happens because FTS publishes both open tenders and framework call-offs in the same feed. The signal is usually buried in the procurement documents: phrases like "this contract will be awarded under [framework name]" or "this is a further competition under CCS agreement RM6098."

By the time you've invested two hours reading the ITT, it's too late — you can't bid.

What this means for your BD strategy

If your agency is active in public sector business development, you likely need to be:

• Watching FTS daily for open tenders in your sector
• On G-Cloud 14 (or TPS when relevant) — if you're not, this is the biggest single gap to fix
• Registered on the key DPS systems active in your target sectors

Most 10–50 person agencies are doing the first and not the other two. The result: they see roughly 60–70% of the market, compete hard on the visible opportunities, and wonder why win rates are lower than expected. The opportunities on frameworks and DPS are often less competitive — smaller pools of registered suppliers, buyers who already have a relationship with the framework.

The monitoring problem

None of this is useful if you're not seeing the opportunities in the first place.

FTS publishes thousands of notices per week. Filtering to the 3–5 that are genuinely relevant to a design or digital agency — open tenders, DPS call-offs, and relevant framework competitions — takes time unless you have a system for it.

Tandara monitors the UK public procurement pipeline daily, filters for tenders relevant to design and digital agencies, and sends a digest of the ones worth looking at. It covers open tenders, DPS call-offs, and flags when a notice is framework-gated so you know before you invest time reading.

Get your free tender digest → tandara.co.uk