FOI_25-223 Procurement activities

Date of response: 19 August 2025

We have now considered your request of 22 July 2025 for the following information:

I am writing to submit a formal Freedom of Information request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 concerning your institution’s procurement activities and commercial opportunities.

Information Requested:

Question 1. Procurement Pipeline

• Schedule of major procurement exercises planned for the next 12–18 months

• Estimated contract values and procurement timelines

• Categories of services and goods to be procured

Question 2. Contract Management Information

• List of significant contracts (over £50,000 annual value) due for renewal in the next 24 months

• Contract end dates and review schedules

• Current framework agreements utilised by the university

Question 3. Consortium and Partnership Procurement

• Participation in higher education procurement consortiums (e.g., LUPC, NEUPC, SUPC)

• Joint procurement activities with other institutions

Scope: Please provide information from [current date] covering the next 24 months

. If any information is commercially confidential, please provide what is available in the public domain.

Our response:

We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.

Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to current contracts with a value exceeding £50,000.00 which are due for renewal (due to expire) in the next 24 months (question 2).

We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.

'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.

Information relating to contracts up for renewal in the next 24 months contract renewal dates and schedules, and which frameworks those contracts were procured by, is held within our Finance and Procurement division, Information Technology department, Estates and Buildings departments. However, whilst some contracts are entered into central contracts register, maintained by our Procurement department, there is no complete record of where all contract information this information is held.

We have identified a minimum of 2,110 contracts held and recorded by our Procurement division alone, which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual contract outline manually.

We have calculated it would take 5 minutes per records, or 175 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual contract. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.

Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we would be able to provide to you a response to question 1, and 3 in full, in relation to our central Procurement division.

Regarding question 2 of your request, we would be able to provide to you a list of contracts exceeding £50,000.00, which have been recorded within our Procurement department’s contract register, where the value and expiration dates have been logged within this register. This will not be the full extensive list of all contracts of this nature, as this ‘register’ is currently still being developed.

Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.

We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.

We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.