/gcloud-kit:tenders

Generate per-service UK procurement intelligence from live awarded-contract data.

Overview

Queries the UK Find a Tender Service (FTS) and Contracts Finder for awarded contracts related to your service's category. Produces a tender intelligence report covering awarded-value benchmarks, incumbent supplier patterns, market concentration, and comparable awards with notice URLs. Use this to validate pricing, identify who actually wins work in your space, and understand how buyers procure your category.

Usage

/gcloud-kit:tenders 001
/gcloud-kit:tenders payroll

Arguments: Service number or name fragment (must match an existing service directory).

Prerequisites

Service design (services/{NNN}-{name}/service-design.md) — required; CPV codes and category are derived from it
Bundled uk-tenders-mcp MCP server — deferred, works out of the box; the command degrades gracefully if the live endpoint is unavailable

Output

services/{NNN}-{name}/tender-intel.md

The report contains:

Awarded-value benchmarks — median, lower quartile (Q1), upper quartile (Q3), and sample size for comparable GBP awards
Incumbency & concentration — the top incumbent and its share of awarded value, plus a concentration band (LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH)
Comparable awards — a table of individual awarded notices: award date, buyer, supplier, value, and a link to the official notice URL
Top suppliers in this space — suppliers ranked by award count and total awarded value
Top buyers in this space — buyers ranked by award count and total awarded value
Gaps & caveats — CPV codes with no awards found, MCP errors, or notices that could not be retrieved

If the uk-tenders-mcp endpoint is unavailable, the command still produces the artefact — the award tables will be empty and the reason recorded under Gaps & caveats.

What it does

Reads the service design to extract category, CPV codes, and lot context
Queries UK tender data (FTS + Contracts Finder) via the uk-tenders-mcp tools
Filters and ranks results by relevance to the service's CPV mapping
Calculates value benchmarks and identifies concentration patterns
Assembles the tender intelligence report and writes it to the service directory

Architecture: three-tier subagent split

The command uses three tiers to keep concerns cleanly separated:

Tier	Role	Boundary
Orchestrator	Reads service design, drives workflow, reviews output	No MCP tools, no file writes
Tenders-reader	Sole caller of `uk-tenders-mcp` tools; returns structured data	Untrusted MCP input boundary — isolated here
Tenders-writer	Sole user of the Write tool; formats and persists the report	No MCP calls

The reader isolation matters because MCP responses are untrusted external input. Confining all uk-tenders-mcp calls to the reader tier prevents prompt-injection or malformed data from reaching the orchestrator or triggering unintended file writes.

Caveats

Awarded value ≠ actual spend — contract values are the notified ceiling at award time; actual spend may differ
CPV ↔ lot mapping is approximate — CPV codes do not map exactly to G-Cloud lots; some awards may be tangential
UK public-sector only — data covers UK contracting authorities; private-sector procurement is not included
OGL v3.0 attribution — tender data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0; downstream use must retain attribution

Related commands

/gcloud-kit:compare — shows who is listed on the Digital Marketplace; tenders shows who actually won public contracts — use both for a complete competitive picture
/gcloud-kit:pricing — use awarded-value benchmarks from this report as a sanity-check when setting day rates or contract values
/gcloud-kit:service-design — creates the service design that this command reads for CPV and category context
/gcloud-kit:sales — spend data from G-Cloud itself; complements tender data from wider procurement routes