# Why does every council run its own tender portal, and is there any way round registering for all of them?
Ask James Pearson of JGP why every council runs its own tender portal and you get a straight answer: “Honestly, I do not know the answer to this. We wish we knew the answer to this. It’s one of the biggest frustrations that exists, I think, and we see it as such a significant waste of money for the public sector to see that level of duplication.”
That is a consultancy that monitors procurement portals for clients every week saying it cannot defend the system it works inside. Nobody official defends it either: we could not find a government page anywhere that explains why a supplier needs a separate login, profile and set of uploaded documents for every authority it wants to sell to. What we can do is explain how the fragmentation arose, what February 2025 actually fixed, and how to cut the registration burden down to a short, regular routine.
How the portal map got this fragmented
Each council is its own contracting authority. It buys its e-tendering system the way it buys everything else: a contract with a software vendor, run to term, then re-procured. In-Tend, Delta eSourcing, Proactis (whose ProContract system sits behind many council portals), Atamis and Mercell are the names you will meet most often, and councils move between them when contracts end. Adur & Worthing switched from In-Tend to Delta in August 2022. West Sussex began running tenders on Atamis instead of In-Tend in April 2023. Dover left Proactis for Delta in October 2025. Essex replaced its ProContract portal with a new system, Open, in spring 2026, and its existing contracted suppliers had to register on Open by 1 April.
The map redraws itself like that continuously, which is why any list of which council uses which portal is stale almost as soon as it is published, and why we are not publishing one here.
Consortium portals are the one mercy. More than thirty councils across the North West share a single supplier registration on The Chest. More than twenty London councils, Sutton among them, take bids through the London Tenders Portal. Supplying the South West, the Kent Business Portal and Supply Hertfordshire do the same job in their regions. One registration on the right consortium portal covers a long list of buyers; one registration on the wrong vendor platform covers nobody you will ever sell to.
What changed in February 2025, and what did not
The Procurement Act 2023 went live for new procurements on 24 February 2025, and with it the Central Digital Platform. Two things genuinely improved.
Notices now sit in one place. Find a Tender, which used to carry only the larger contracts, now also carries below-threshold notices for procurements run under the Act, and if a council chooses to advertise a contract worth £30,000 including VAT or more, the tender notice must be published there before the advert appears anywhere else (a duty we checked at source on 12 October 2026 for our guide to below-threshold council work). You can watch one site and see the advertised pipeline.
Core company information is now entered once. You register your business details on the platform and, when you bid, hand the buyer a share code instead of retyping your company number, accounts and connected-person details into another portal’s forms. Councils have started asking for that share code as part of the submission itself.
Here is what did not change: you still bid on the buyer’s own portal. Council supplier pages say so without embarrassment. The authority continues to advertise, receive and manage bids through its existing e-tendering system, and the Central Digital Platform is an addition rather than a replacement; Lancaster’s supplier page tells bidders plainly that they need to be registered on both The Chest and the Central Digital Platform. For a bidder, the Act’s unglamorous reality is one more registration, sitting on top of the ones you already hold.
One date worth knowing if you work below the thresholds: from 1 April 2026, a supplier awarded a contract worth £30,000 or more below the thresholds by a council in England or Northern Ireland has to be registered on the platform, with its basic details submitted, so the award can be recorded against its unique identifier. The rules do not make it a condition of bidding, though some councils already require it: Nottingham does for every invitation to tender, though not for quotes. Register once, early, and the point never arises.
The way round is not registering everywhere
The question our clients usually mean is “how do I stop this eating my week?”, and the answer is to stop treating registration as insurance. Registering everywhere just in case is how a business ends up maintaining a dozen dormant portal profiles, each with an insurance certificate quietly going out of date on it.
Work it the other way round, from buyers to portals.
- If you sell to buyers in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, register on the Central Digital Platform first. You will need it to bid above threshold, English and Northern Irish councils will need it at award for contracts of £30,000 or more, and it is where the notices live.
- Name your likely buyers. For most SMEs that is a geography (the councils and authorities within reach) plus a sector (the trusts, universities or housing associations you could genuinely serve). Ten named buyers is a realistic list; “the public sector” is not.
- Register where those buyers take bids. In the North West that may be one registration on The Chest. In London, the London Tenders Portal. In Scotland, Public Contracts Scotland, the national e-tendering system our Scotland guide covers. In Wales, Sell2Wales for finding work and eTenderWales for submitting it. In Northern Ireland, eTendersNI for most public bodies, though Belfast City Council uses eSourcing NI. Selling to the NHS, learn Atamis, the single eCommercial system NHS England has been rolling out: by July 2023, 73% of trusts, foundation trusts and ICBs had onboarded to at least one part of it, as our NHS supplier guide sets out.
- Leave everything else unregistered until a live notice makes the registration worth the hour.
There is a quieter reason to hold the right registrations and keep them current. Below the thresholds a council does not have to advertise at all, and below £30,000 it does not have to publish a notice on Find a Tender either. It can simply invite quotes, and those invitations tend to reach the suppliers already registered and findable on its portal. The registrations you chose deliberately are also your route into the work that never gets advertised.
A routine that keeps it survivable
Monitoring is a separate job from registering, and the easier one now that notices are centralised. A workable weekly shape: saved searches and email alerts on Find a Tender for your categories and regions, one half-hour pass on the alerts each week, and a log-in to your consortium portal often enough that a quote invitation never sits unread for a fortnight.
Keep a one-page register of your portal accounts: which authority, which platform, which documents you uploaded and when they expire. Renew the documents on the profiles you decided to keep, so an invitation never lands on a profile with an expired certificate attached.
And keep selection discipline. More portals watched does not mean more contracts won; our guide to choosing the right tender opportunities makes the case that selection, not volume, is what moves a win rate.
Where JGP fits, and where the frustration stands
Our Tender Finder service exists because of exactly this admin. We learn your business and goals, watch the procurement sites and publications, and send a bespoke weekly summary report of suitable opportunities, and on request we source the bid documents for certain opportunities without you going through each portal’s registration process. For a firm that would rather spend the day delivering than scrolling portals, that is the trade on offer.
None of it makes the duplication defensible, and we will not pretend otherwise; James’s words above stand. Until something consolidates the bidding layer itself, the way round is the one described here: one national registration, a short list of portals chosen from your actual buyers, and a weekly routine measured in minutes.