A tender usually follows earlier planning and budgeting. Public records can help you research some of that preparation, although the amount of detail and lead time vary by project.
Most of those earlier steps are published by law. They are published in different places, in formats designed for public accountability rather than for suppliers, which is why so few suppliers read them.
Pipeline notices, the duty most suppliers have never heard of
Under section 93 of the Procurement Act 2023, a contracting authority that expects to pay more than £100 million under relevant contracts in a coming financial year has to publish a pipeline notice. It covers the following eighteen months, it must list every public contract with an estimated value above £2 million that the authority intends to award, and it has to be published within fifty-six days of the start of the financial year.
For authorities covered by the duty, the pipeline notice is a useful view of intended higher-value buying. Read the stated scope and dates, then confirm whether the project remains planned.
Some notices give detailed scope and timing; others give only an outline. Even a brief entry can identify a buyer worth researching. It cannot guarantee how much time remains before a competition.
Two limits are worth stating plainly. The duty only bites above the £100 million spend threshold, so it captures central departments, large councils, NHS trusts and the bigger utilities while missing smaller authorities entirely. And the notices describe intention. Projects on them get cancelled, delayed and merged, so treat one as a strong lead rather than a commitment.
The national infrastructure pipeline
NISTA, the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, launched on 1 April 2025 by merging the National Infrastructure Commission with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority. It sits across HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office, and it publishes the UK infrastructure pipeline, which set out 780 projects and a £530 billion investment intention over ten years when it was first issued in July 2025.
A ten-year pipeline is not a lead list. It is a map of where sustained demand is going to sit, which is a different and slower kind of useful. If you are deciding which accreditation to fund, which region to open in, or which capability to hire for, that document tells you where the money is scheduled to go. Read it once a year with a strategy hat on, then go back to the sources below for anything you can actually bid.
Council forward plans, and the twenty-eight day rule
Council forward plans are a useful free source of proposed decisions.
Every English council operating executive arrangements must publish notice of a key decision at least twenty-eight clear days before it is taken. A key decision is one involving significant expenditure or savings against the authority's budget, or one with significant effects on two or more wards. The notice has to state the subject matter, name the decision maker, give the date or period for the decision, and list the documents being put in front of them.
So a council that is about to approve a capital scheme, appoint to a major contract, or restructure a service publishes the fact four weeks before it happens, along with the report that explains it. Those reports are the good part. A cabinet paper recommending a scheme typically contains the business case, the estimated cost, the delivery route, the programme and the risks. It is the internal thinking, published, because the law requires it.
Look for forward plans or key decisions on the council's democratic services website. Read the associated reports for the proposed delivery route and any unresolved conditions.
Planning, and what changed in 2025
For buildings and infrastructure, the planning system publishes a project before procurement does, and the timetable is statutory.
Ordinary applications are determined in eight weeks, thirteen for major development, or sixteen where an environmental impact assessment is required. Major development means ten or more dwellings, a site of half a hectare or more, or a floorspace of a thousand square metres or a site of one hectare for everything else. Those thresholds are how you filter a planning feed down to the applications with a supply chain attached.
The largest schemes go through a different route. A nationally significant infrastructure project applies for a development consent order under the Planning Act 2008, and the stages are timed: twenty-eight days to decide whether to accept the application, an expectation of around four months of pre-examination, six months of examination, three months for the examining authority to write its report, and three months for the Secretary of State to decide. From acceptance to decision is therefore usually a year and a half, all of it on the public register, with every document the applicant submitted.
One change is worth flagging because it removes a signal suppliers relied on. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 removed the strict statutory pre-application consultation requirements that used to sit in the Planning Act. Applicants are still expected to engage, and the guidance is emphatic that they should, though the prescribed process has gone. In practice that means the reliable, dated, publicly advertised consultation events that used to announce a major scheme eighteen months early are no longer guaranteed. Watch the acceptance stage on the planning inspectorate's register instead, since that remains fixed.
Capital programmes and board papers
Public bodies publish their spending intentions before they commit to them, in documents nobody markets to you.
Council capital programmes are approved annually alongside the budget and list schemes with values and years. NHS trust board papers are published ahead of public board meetings and carry estate strategies, business cases and procurement plans. University estate strategies, housing association development programmes and combined authority investment plans all work the same way. These are five-year documents, so read them for pattern rather than for a date: a scheme that appears in year four of a capital programme this year is worth a relationship now.
Allow for uncertainty in early plans
Every one of these sources sits somewhere on the same curve. The earlier you see something, the less certain it is that it will happen.
A long-term pipeline entry indicates an intention. A capital programme may change, a permission may remain unbuilt and a tender can be cancelled. Later records usually provide more detail, but none guarantees a contract for your business.
Choose sources that suit your sales cycle and capacity. Early plans may justify research and relationship building; a business needing work soon should also monitor live opportunities. Record what still needs to happen before a scheme could produce work.
Talking to the right organisation
The most common error in early project selling is contacting the client. The client is often not the buyer.
On a construction scheme the client appoints a main contractor, and the main contractor appoints the supply chain. If you supply a trade package, the council or developer named on the planning application will politely tell you to wait, because they do not know who their contractor is either. What you want from the early signal is the timeline and the professional team, so you know which contractors are likely to bid and can be in front of their estimators before they are pricing.
Planning documents give you that team. The design and access statement, the drawings and the supporting reports carry the architect, the engineer, the planning consultant and often the quantity surveyor. Those firms move from scheme to scheme. A relationship with a consultant who specifies your category is worth more than any single project on the register.
Setting up a watch that survives a busy month
Pick the twenty or thirty organisations that could realistically buy from you within an hour's travel or your delivery footprint. Not every council in England. The ones you would actually serve.
For each, find the forward plan page and the planning weekly list, and subscribe where a subscription exists. Diary the pipeline notices for late May, when the fifty-six day window closes and the current year's crop is complete. Read the capital programme once, in February or March, when budgets are set. Then hold a fortnightly hour to work through what arrived.
Review whether the watch is producing relevant information and whether you can maintain it. A routine that repeatedly gets skipped needs a different allocation of time or support.
ReachSpot checks available project notices against your business profile and retains the source for review. Compare its published coverage with the sources you need before relying on it for your watch.