Public Contracts Regulations 2015 - Regulation 106

Regulation 106 - Publication of information on Contracts Finder where contract notices are used

We can find in this Regulation the rules applicable to the publication of information on the national portal Contracts Finder. According to paragraph 1, after a contract notice is sent to publication to the EU Publications Office, the contracting authority shall make the same information available on Contracts Finder within 24 hours of being eligible to do so. The drafting of this paragraph could be improved as on a first read the paragraph appears to imply that the information needs to be published on Contracts Finder within 24 hours of being remitted to the EU Publications Office, but that is not the case.

Paragraph 2 sets what contract notice information must be published on Contracts Finder, such as the web address where documents can be found, timescales, points of contact and other requirements.

Paragraphs 3 to 5 creates an obligation of compliance for further guidance which may be issued by the Minister for the Cabinet Office regarding this matter. One of the situations where such guidance may be forthcoming is on the possibility of the Cabinet Office automatically extracting the data from the EU Publications Office without any intervention by the contracting authority.

At the time of writing (August 2015) the only guidance I could find related with publication of information on Contracts Finder was The Guidance on the new transparency requirements for publishing on Contracts Finder which does not tackle the issue of scraping the contract notice information automatically from the EU Publications Office. Interestingly enough, said guidance claims not to be statutory but is still to be observed by force of paragraph 3.