Wales and Northern Ireland get the least attention from UK suppliers, and that is precisely the argument for paying attention to them. Fewer notices means fewer bidders per notice. A competition with four responses is a better use of a week than one with forty.
Both are covered by the Procurement Act 2023, unlike Scotland. But both have their own portal and their own policy layer on top, and neither is reachable from a Find a Tender habit alone.
Wales
Sell2Wales
Sell2Wales is the Welsh public sector portal, covering local authorities, NHS Wales, the Welsh Government, higher and further education, housing associations, fire and rescue and the emergency services. Registration is free.
Volume is modest — often a handful of notices a day rather than dozens — which cuts both ways. It is quick to check, and it is easy to stop checking.
Alongside it, eTender Wales is the Jaggaer-based eSourcing system used by the Welsh Government and NHS Wales to run the competitions themselves. As elsewhere in the UK, the notice and the competition frequently live in different places, and being registered on the system where the documents actually sit puts you ahead of suppliers who wait for a national alert.
The thresholds
Welsh contracting authorities operate under the Procurement Act 2023, so the same figures apply as in England: from 1 January 2026, around £135,018 for central government goods and services, £207,720 for the wider public sector and £5,193,000 for works, all including VAT, with below-threshold advertising obligations starting at £12,000 and £30,000 including VAT.
Socially responsible procurement
This is where Wales genuinely differs. The Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023 places statutory socially responsible procurement duties on Welsh public bodies. Its provisions have been commenced in stages through 2025 and 2026, and contracting authorities are required to seek to improve the economic, social, environmental and cultural wellbeing of their area through the way they buy, to set objectives against wellbeing goals, and to publish procurement strategies and reports.
For a bidder, three practical consequences:
- Cultural wellbeing is explicitly in scope, which is unusual, and the Welsh language is part of it. Welsh language provision — signage, correspondence, service delivery, staffing — is a real and frequently scored requirement, not a formality.
- Fair work and ethical supply chains carry weight, including the treatment of workers throughout your supply chain.
- The wellbeing framing is specific to Wales. An English social value answer transplanted straight across will read as generic. Rewrite it around the wellbeing goals and the local area.
Northern Ireland
eTendersNI
eTendersNI is the Northern Ireland portal, run through the Construction and Procurement Delivery arm of the Department of Finance. It carries notices from NI departments, councils, health and social care trusts, education bodies, universities and the emergency services.
Two practical notes. Volume is the lowest of the UK portals, so alerts matter more than browsing. And the search interface is more defensive than its counterparts — there is a CAPTCHA on the search form — which in itself keeps casual traffic away.
Much of Northern Ireland's public buying is handled through Centres of Procurement Expertise, the specialist procurement bodies that run competitions on behalf of departments and public bodies rather than each organisation doing its own. Knowing which centre covers your sector is worth more than knowing individual buyers.
Social value is heavily weighted
Northern Ireland moved on social value early and firmly. Procurement Policy Note 01/21 has required a minimum 10% of total award criteria to be allocated to social value since June 2022, and a revised version took effect on 24 February 2025. It also carries mandatory fair work requirements and a requirement to consider reserving contracts.
The Northern Ireland model is concrete and heavily focused on employment and skills: paid employment opportunities for people who face barriers to work, apprenticeships, work placements, support for social enterprises and small businesses in the supply chain, and zero-carbon commitments.
Answer it with numbers of placements, named partner organisations and a delivery plan. Commitments here end up monitored against the contract.
If you are bidding across borders
Register separately, everywhere. Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI and Public Contracts Scotland are five registrations and five alert configurations. There is no single sign-on and no shared profile.
Rewrite the social value section for each nation. The central government social value model in England, wellbeing goals and the Welsh language in Wales, PPN 01/21 employment and skills outcomes in Northern Ireland, fair work and community benefits in Scotland. It is the same underlying evidence framed four ways, and the framing is scored.
Take local delivery seriously. In smaller markets, buyers know their supplier base personally. A credible local partner, a local subcontractor or a local base answers a question the evaluators are asking anyway.
Do not assume low volume means low value. Health and social care trusts, universities and infrastructure bodies in both nations run substantial contracts. There are simply fewer of them, and fewer people watching.
Watching all four nations at once
TendersHub tracks 10,500+ live UK tenders across Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Sell2Wales, eTendersNI, Public Contracts Scotland and the eProcurement platforms behind them.
For a supplier that could work anywhere in the UK, the cost of covering Wales and Northern Ireland properly has always been two more portals to check on a Monday morning. That is a poor reason to leave the least crowded competitions in the country to somebody else.