The over-ask problem
Of 3,000+ tenders whose documents we have read and structured, 280 — 9.3% — set a financial ask far above the contract's own estimated value, across 180 different buyers. The exhibits are not marginal: £5m of Public Liability cover for a £1,000 bus-shelter cleaning contract. £10m of cover to dig graves on a £16.5k contract. £150k of minimum turnover to sweep roads on a £6k job — when government guidance caps turnover minimums at twice the contract value.
Almost none of this is intent. It reads as boilerplate — a bigger contract's terms pasted onto a small one, concentrated in the small buyers least resourced to tailor their templates. But the effect is real: the requirement quietly decides who can bid before quality or price is ever compared. The platform flags every one of these on the tender itself, side by side with what tenders in that category typically ask.
Second chances
Right now, 46 live UK tenders are near-identical re-runs of notices that already closed once — matched on meaning, not title, so renamed re-runs are caught. A re-run usually means the first round didn't stick: nobody suitable bid, the bids missed the budget, or the award fell through. Fewer bidders typically return the second time, which makes these some of the least-contested live opportunities in the country.
Decided in committee
590+ procurement decisions read from councils' own published committee papers — approvals to procure, with values and expected tender dates, months before any notice appears. Alongside them: 70 contract extensions and 33 competition waivers approved this summer — competition deferred, not avoided, and each one a dated marker of a future procurement.
The certification keys
Reading requirements at scale shows which accreditations actually gate which work: Cyber Essentials Plus recurs as a mandatory gate across digital tenders; MCS certification is demanded in almost every solar installation; play-area work converges on one fixed bundle of standards. Where a certification recurs as mandatory, holding it makes a whole vertical biddable — a fact you can plan an investment around.
Method
Requirements are extracted from the tender documents themselves, published under the Open Government Licence. A notice is flagged as over-asking only when its estimated value is real, the ask is explicit, and the ratio is unambiguous — turnover above twice the value, or insurance of £5m and up at 100 times the value or worse, with Employer's Liability excluded because £5m there is a statutory minimum. Second-chance matches use semantic similarity against expired notices from the same buyer, with framework call-off series excluded. Committee facts are quote-anchored to the public paper they came from. Every figure refreshes nightly inside the platform.
Inside ENKII, every flag lands on the tender itself — the over-ask named with the numbers, the second chance flagged with the earlier notice, the committee decision surfaced before the tender exists. Create a free account and see them against what you sell.
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