Public sector buyer contact details

BidSquirrel is a service operated by Orcana Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales (company no. 17263330), whose registered office is Beverley Road, Hull, HU6 7JN, United Kingdom. Orcana Ltd is the data controller for the information described below.

We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), registration no. ZC171438.

We collect UK public procurement notices from official published sources: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and a small number of authority e-tendering portals. These notices are published by contracting authorities as open data.

Where a notice includes a procurement contact point, we hold the name, email address and telephone number exactly as the authority published them in that notice. In many cases the contact is a team or role account rather than a person.

We do not enrich, append, infer or purchase any contact information. We do not look anyone up on LinkedIn or in any third-party database. If a detail is not in the notice, we do not have it. This is a deliberate limit, not a current shortcoming.

We show these details to our users — UK businesses looking for public sector work — so they can contact the right person about a procurement, in the way the authority intended when it published the notice.

Our lawful basis is legitimate interests(UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)): our interest and our users' interest in connecting suppliers to the buyers who published these details for that purpose. We consider the impact on the individual to be low because the information is already public, was published by their employer for this exact reason, relates to their professional role rather than their private life, and is shown to our users unchanged.

We show the contact alongside guidance on when it is appropriate to make contact — because that differs by stage. Before a procurement begins, authorities actively invite engagement. Once a procurement is live, questions normally go through the formal clarification process so every bidder receives the same answer. After award, there is no restriction.

We do not enable bulk export or bulk messaging of these contacts, and we do not use them for our own marketing.

We keep the notice, including its contact point, for as long as it is useful as procurement history — award records remain relevant for years, because they show what an authority bought and when it may buy again. If an authority withdraws or amends a notice at source, our copy is updated or removed when we next ingest from that source.

You have the right to object to our processing of your details, and to request access, correction or erasure. Because we rely on legitimate interests, an objection requires us to stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your rights.

To have your details suppressed, email privacy@bidsquirrel.co.uk with the notice reference or the authority name. We will remove your personal contact details from what we display and keep a minimal suppression record so they are not re-added by a later ingest. You do not need to give a reason.

That suppression record does not contain your details. It holds a one-way scrambled version of them, which lets an incoming notice be recognised and filtered without us keeping the address, name or number itself. It is applied when a page is built rather than by editing the stored notice, so re-publication by the source cannot undo it.

Note that suppressing them with us does not remove them from the original notice on the publishing source — only the authority that published it can do that.

You can also complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

This page covers procurement contact details published in notices. For how we handle data for people who use the BidSquirrel product, see our Privacy Policy. For businesses we have contacted directly, see why you received an email from us.