Awarded without open competition
Awarded without open competition. The buyer went directly to one or a few suppliers instead of advertising the contract. Procurement rules allow this only in specific cases, such as extreme urgency, when only one supplier can do the work, or for call-offs from an existing framework.
Key facts
- Buyer
- Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs · Ministry or any other national or federal authority, including their regional or local subdivisions
- Supplier
- Elsevier B V
- Value
- £37,438
- Procedure
- Award procedure without prior publication of a call for competition
- Sector
- Software & information systems · IT software package (CPV 48517000)
- Region
- London
- Official notice
- 027091-2026 on Find a Tender
- Timeline
-
- Contract date15 Jan 2026
- Published25 Mar 2026Published 69 days after the contract date
Description
Defra has a legal obligation to publish its research outputs on compliant platforms and to manage its R&D programme with transparency, auditability, and accountability—demonstrating the value and impact of public investment. As part of Discovery work, a Proof of Concept exercise was run through a compliant framework for a short-term period (three months) to understand and test the requirements needed to support a future procurement exercise.<br/>Discussions were held with Project team to understand the market and potential solutions that would meet the requirements. Given the requirements for a Cloud solution, it was felt that the use of the G-Cloud 14 framework offered the best route to market for the purchase of the exploratory pilot Research Repository Service. A downselect was conducted via G-Cloud 14 in accordance with the Framework terms.<br/><br/>Although this is a call-off from the G-Cloud 14 Framework, the justification for this Direct Award is under regulation 32 (2) (b) of …
About the supplier
Elsevier B V: every public contract they have won, plus their Companies House record (company 01982084).