Transparency on the reporting of public procurement information: lessons from handling compiled procurement information

Based on lessons learn from the exploration of public procurement data in the UK, this paper highlights key challenges affecting the transparency of public procurement information in the UK, including data quality issues such as lack of unique identifiers, duplicated records, inconsistent dates, and missing data fields. These issues make it difficult to track procurement processes end-to-end and reduce accountability. Upcoming regulatory changes are expected to help centralize procurement data and address some problems. Overall, improving data collection, quality, and availability in public procurement is important to support accountability, transparency and to inform policy reform.