Free Guide: Cambridgeshire Spending & Supplier Profile
A free spending & supplier guide for Cambridgeshire County Council · County · East of England
Data covering 2014 to 2026
Recorded Spend
£0
Transactions
2,718,364
Suppliers
6,026
Key Takeaways
- 2.7 million transactions tracked across a spending window running from 2014 to 2026
- 6,026 identified suppliers spread across 22 sectors, with an unconcentrated HHI of 175
- £840 million in recorded tender value from 169 published tenders, dwarfing the £4 million in contract notices
How big is Cambridgeshire as a buyer?
This is a county council covering 657,000 people across 1,176 square miles, and the spending data matches that scale. Our dataset holds 2.7 million transactions drawn from 137 source files, with records spanning 2014 to 2026. The recorded contract value sits at roughly £4 million across 308 contracts, but that number on its own is misleading. The tender pipeline tells a different story: 169 published tenders worth a combined £840 million. That gap between contract notices and tender values is worth noting. It suggests much of the big-ticket procurement flows through formal tenders rather than smaller published contracts. Data is sourced from data.cambridgeshireinsight.org.uk and Find a Tender Service, so you're seeing both local transparency data and nationally published procurements. For a county council with this population, the volume of recorded transactions points to a buyer that publishes consistently.
Construction and care dominate, but nobody owns this market
Health and social work is the largest sector in our data, accounting for 24% of recorded spend with 804 identified suppliers. Construction follows at 20.8%, though it takes far fewer suppliers (288) to reach that share. That contrast matters. Construction spend concentrates in a handful of large firms. Skanska leads all identified suppliers at £284 million, with Morgan Sindall at £173 million. Between them, those two firms account for a sizeable chunk of total tracked spend. But the overall market is wide open. The HHI is just 175, which is very low, and the top five suppliers account for only 24.3% of spend. Across all the spending records we hold, 6,026 suppliers have been matched. Administrative services (14%), education (7.3%) and transport (7.1%) fill out the mid-tier. If you're outside construction or care, the field is less crowded but the spend volumes drop quickly.
Almost everything goes to open tender, so where are the rest?
Of the 11 contracts with procurement method data, 10 were awarded through open competition and just one was a direct award. That is a striking ratio, though the sample is small. The median contract value across these sits at £160,000, with six above the procurement threshold and five below. So Cambridgeshire appears to run a relatively open process for the contracts captured here. But 11 contracts with method data against 308 total contracts and 169 tenders means there's a lot of procurement activity where we don't have the route-to-market detail. The tender pipeline is where the real value sits: £840 million across those 169 tenders. That pipeline, combined with the low market concentration, suggests this is a council where new entrants can compete. Whether that holds across all service areas is harder to say from the data alone.
| # | Supplier | Spend |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SKANSKA CONSTRUCTION UK LIMITED | £284,341,509 |
| 2 | MORGAN SINDALL CONSTRUCTION & INFRASTRUCTURE LTD | £173,098,077 |
| 3 | THALIA WB SPV LIMITED | £155,365,921 |
| 4 | CONNECT ROADS CAMBRIDGESHIRE LIMITED | £95,247,918 |
| 5 | OPUS PEOPLE SOLUTIONS LIMITED | £80,013,052 |
| 6 | EQUITIX EDUCATION (CAMBRIDGESHIRE) LIMITED | £65,478,111 |
| 7 | THERA EAST ANGLIA | £50,413,122 |
| 8 | STAGECOACH SERVICES LIMITED | £48,681,385 |
| 9 | VOLKERFITZPATRICK LIMITED | £45,957,723 |
| 10 | CHANGE, GROW, LIVE SERVICES LIMITED | £35,270,647 |
About Us
CouncilLedger brings together spending records, contract awards, and tender notices from over 400 UK local authorities into one procurement intelligence platform. Our data covers 16 years of transactions, collected directly from council transparency publications and government procurement platforms. Search suppliers, track spending trends, discover tender opportunities, and monitor the contracts that matter to your business.
