How to Find Government Design Contracts in the UK

The UK government and its agencies spend billions each year on design, UX, service design, and digital transformation work. A meaningful chunk of that is accessible to agencies your size — 10 to 50 people. The problem isn't the supply. It's finding the work before the deadline is 48 hours away and someone else is already writing the bid.

This guide covers every major channel for finding public sector design contracts in the UK, what's changed recently, and where agencies like yours are most likely to find winnable opportunities.

The landscape changed in February 2025

Before diving into the portals, it's worth knowing what shifted. The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025, and it rewired the way UK public sector contracts are published.

The short version: Find a Tender Service (FTS) is now the single place where all new public sector procurement notices must be published — both above and below the previous OJEU threshold. Contracts Finder, the old below-threshold portal, is no longer required for new procurements (though it still exists for contracts tendered under the old rules).

If you were using Contracts Finder as your main source until now, you've probably been missing things since February 2025. FTS is where you need to be.

1. Find a Tender Service (FTS)

FTS is the primary procurement portal for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland under the new regime. Central government departments, NHS bodies, and local authorities are all required to publish here. You'll find contract notices, pipeline notices (which tell you what's coming before it's formally advertised), and award notices.

The search functionality is functional but not sophisticated. You can filter by keyword, buyer, and notice type, but the category labels are still broad — "IT services" captures a lot of noise alongside genuine UX and service design work. Setting up keyword alerts using terms like "user research", "service design", "UX", "digital transformation", or "accessibility" will get you closer.

One practical tip: FTS now includes pipeline notices, which means buyers are required to signal upcoming procurements before they formally launch. This is new under the Procurement Act and genuinely useful — you can spot relevant work months before the ITT lands.

2. Contracts Finder

Contracts Finder hasn't been shut down — it still holds a large archive of awarded contracts, which is useful for market intelligence. If you want to know which agencies have won NHS communications work in the past three years, or what a council paid for a previous UX project, the awards data is worth mining.

What it no longer is: the place to find live tender opportunities. New procurements are published on FTS.

3. Crown Commercial Service frameworks — DOS7 and G-Cloud

For many UK design and digital agencies, getting onto a framework is the most efficient route to public sector work. You're pre-qualified, and buyers can procure from you without a full open tender process.

Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 (DOS7)

DOS7 launched in early 2026 and replaces both DOS6 (RM1043.8, extended until June 2026) and the Digital Specialists and Programmes framework (RM6263). If you're on DOS6 or DSP, you'll need to apply separately for DOS7 — inclusion doesn't carry over automatically.

Being on DOS7 matters because many government buyers, particularly in central government and the GDS world, will only run callouts through framework agreements. If you're not on the framework, you can't bid, regardless of how relevant your experience is.

G-Cloud

G-Cloud covers cloud software, cloud support, and cloud hosting. It's less relevant for pure service design or UX work — but if your agency sells a digital product alongside consulting (a CMS, a booking system, a design system tool), it's worth having a catalogue entry. Buyers can procure directly from G-Cloud without a tender process. G-Cloud 15 is expected in late 2026.

4. NHS procurement

The NHS is one of the largest buyers of design and digital work in the country — from patient-facing communications to transformation programmes to digital health products. But navigating NHS procurement is its own discipline.

Atamis is the primary e-tendering platform used by most NHS organisations in England. If you're registering as a supplier to NHS trusts, integrated care boards (ICBs), or NHS England directly, you'll need an Atamis profile. Registration is free.

NHS England is now publishing contract notices on FTS as required by the Procurement Act, so FTS is your first checkpoint for NHS opportunities. But smaller trusts and regional commissioning bodies sometimes use their own portals or run procurements through local buying consortia, so FTS alone won't catch everything.

It's also worth registering with regional NHS procurement hubs — for example, the East of England Collaborative Procurement Hub, NHS London Procurement Partnership, or NHS Commercial Solutions. These hubs aggregate procurement across multiple trusts and often run framework agreements that include design and digital work.

5. Council and local authority portals

This is where it gets fragmented. The UK has over 300 local authorities, and many of them run their own e-procurement portals — some on FTS, some on legacy systems, some on council-specific platforms.

The most significant aggregated portal for councils is the London Tenders Portal (londontenders.org), which covers 18 London Boroughs and uses the ProContract platform. If your agency works with London councils, this is worth monitoring regularly. Registration is free and straightforward.

Outside London, you'll find council tenders variously on FTS (the Procurement Act now pushes councils there), ProContract, In-Tend, and occasionally Bravo or SAP Ariba implementations. There's no single portal that catches everything. The most reliable approach is to identify which 10–15 councils are realistic clients for your agency — geographic, sector focus, track record — and check their procurement pages directly on a schedule.

The honest problem with all of this

None of these portals were designed with design and digital agencies in mind. The category taxonomy is built around CPV codes developed for construction, FM, and general IT procurement. Searching for "service design" in FTS returns a mix of genuine UX projects, signage contracts, and administrative software tenders. The noise is high.

The result: most agencies in your position monitor one or two portals inconsistently, miss relevant work they'd have had a genuine shot at, and only find out about it when a competitor wins and posts about it on LinkedIn.

A systematic approach — covering FTS, the relevant NHS channels, the London Tenders Portal, and framework callout alerts — probably catches 80% of the relevant market. Getting from 80% to 90%+ requires either significant manual time or a tool that does the filtering for you.

Get relevant opportunities in your inbox

Tandara monitors FTS, NHS portals, council platforms, and framework callouts daily and filters the results for design, digital, and creative agencies. Instead of spending hours scanning portals, you get a short daily digest of the contracts that match what your agency actually does — with estimated value, deadline, and buyer.

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