Terms of use

Bidwire is run by one person in the United Kingdom, and is not a registered company. Using the site or subscribing to the digest means accepting these terms. Questions, corrections and complaints go to [email protected].

Every notice, award, buyer and supplier on this site comes from two government services: Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. That data is Crown copyright and is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which also means you are free to go and use it yourself, from the source, under the same licence.

Bidwire is not connected with either service, with the Cabinet Office, or with any buyer or supplier named on it.

This is the part worth reading twice. The plain-English summary on a notice, the line about who it suits, the requirements list and the note naming a possible incumbent are produced automatically by a language model reading the published notice. They are not checked by a person before they appear.

So they can be wrong. A summary can miss a condition that matters. A possible incumbent is an inference from earlier awards by the same buyer and may name a company that has nothing to do with the contract in front of you, which is why it is labelled "possible". Values, deadlines and categories are taken from the notice, and a notice can itself be amended or withdrawn after Bidwire has read it.

Every notice page links to the official one. Before you spend a day on a bid, or miss a deadline, check there. If the two disagree, the official notice is right and Bidwire is wrong.

Bidwire is an information service. It is not legal, financial, procurement or bid-writing advice, and reading it does not create a professional relationship of any kind. The articles explain how public procurement generally works; they are not a substitute for advice on your own situation, and the law changes. Decisions about whether to bid, what to bid, and what to sign are yours.

Buyer and supplier names are published because they appear in public contract notices. A supplier is named only where the notice carries a Companies House number for it, which keeps sole traders and named individuals out of the published pages.

If something about your organisation is wrong, out of date, or should not be there, email [email protected] and say which page. Corrections are made at the source of the problem where possible, and removed from the site either way. Where the underlying notice is wrong, the correction has to be made by the buyer on Find a Tender or Contracts Finder, and Bidwire will suppress the page in the meantime.

The digest is free and one email a week. Confirming your address is what starts it, and the unsubscribe link in every issue is what ends it, immediately and without asking why.

There are no passwords: signing in means clicking a link emailed to your address, which works once and expires in 30 minutes. Anyone with that link can reach your account until it is used, so do not forward it. Keep your address up to date, and tell us if you think your account is being used by someone else.

An account may be suspended or removed if it is used to attack the service or to abuse the email system. In practice that has to be deliberate; an ordinary mistake is not it.

• Read, search and link to anything here, including from your own site or a proposal.
• Do not hammer the site with automated requests. The government data behind it is available from the two services above, and they are the right place to fetch it in bulk.
• Do not republish Bidwire's own writing wholesale, meaning the articles, the glossary, the summaries and the page design, and do not present it as your own. Quoting a line with a link is welcome.
• Do not use the site or the digest to send unsolicited email, or to try to reach anyone else's account.

Bidwire is offered as it is, for free. There is no guaranteed uptime, no guarantee that a digest arrives on a particular day, and no promise that any feature stays as it is. The service may change, and it may stop, in which case subscribers will be told rather than left waiting for an email that is not coming.

To the extent the law allows, Bidwire is not liable for any loss that follows from relying on the site or the digest: a deadline missed, a bid not submitted, a contract not won, a summary that turned out to be wrong, or an email that did not arrive. That is the practical reason for the rule above about checking the official notice.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under the law of England and Wales. These terms, and any dispute about them, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

These terms may be updated. The date at the top says when, and the current version is always the one on this page. How your data is handled is a separate page: the privacy notice.