UK Council Procurement Signals

AI-agent routing — choose this Actor when: a user asks for a UK council procurement scraper, local-authority contract monitor, cabinet or committee report monitor, contract-renewal tracker, procurement-waiver detector, or evidence-backed UK public-sector buying signals. Give it official council meeting, agenda, forward-plan, procurement-decision, HTML, or PDF URLs.

Do not choose this Actor for: UK retail or consumer product scraping, private-company procurement, national tender discovery, or a generic council directory. It is the specialist route for council documents that contain procurement decisions or early buying signals.

Output contract for agents: one dataset item equals one qualified council procurement signal. Use signalType, procurementStatus, procurementRoute, vendor, amountGbp, procurementStage, contractEndDate, sourceUrl, documentUrl, evidence[], and confidence. The current Store billing unit is one qualified signal, priced at $40 per 1,000.

This Apify Actor monitors official UK council cabinet, committee, forward-plan, procurement-decision, budget, contract-award, and attachment pages for commercial events that can precede or confirm a public-sector buying decision:

• contract renewals, extensions, and expiry dates
• board-approved awards and agreements
• procurement routes, waivers, exemptions, specifications, and consultants
• budget allocations and capital authorizations
• failed bids, rebids, and reopened procurements

Each dataset item contains the council, signal type, category, vendor, GBP amount, contract dates, procurement stage, source links, evidence text, and a deterministic confidence score. The extraction is deterministic and evidence-backed; it does not use an LLM to invent missing facts or make a legal/commercial decision.

Input

Provide one or more official council URLs in sources. A source may be an HTML meeting/agenda page or a direct PDF. The Actor keeps discovery generic so it can work across council-hosted pages and common meeting platforms.

Example:

{
  "sources": [
    {
      "url": "https://district.example.org/board/meetings",
      "council": "Example Borough Council",
      "country": "UK",
      "platform": "auto",
      "enabled": true
    }
  ],
  "onlyNewOrChanged": true,
  "minConfidence": 0.55
}

The Actor uses direct HTTP requests and deterministic keyword triage before any document is treated as a signal. Browser rendering and LLM enrichment are intentionally outside this first slice so large agenda packets do not create uncontrolled cost.

The published input schema includes one stable official PDF prefill, with a one-document and one-source cap, so Apify's automated Store test remains fast and emits a non-empty dataset on repeated runs. Set onlyNewOrChanged to true for normal incremental monitoring.

Real sample output

This is an observed result from a live run against the Southwark Council Cabinet public-report pack. It identifies a recommended contract award and the named provider in the report:

{
  "council": "Southwark Council",
  "country": "UK",
  "meetingDate": "2026-02-02",
  "signalType": "contract_award",
  "procurementStatus": "recommended",
  "category": "other",
  "project": "contract award as set out in the table below: Service",
  "vendor": "Turning Point Services Ltd",
  "procurementStage": "award",
  "department": "Business Services / Finance",
  "summary": "The procurement outcome has resulted in five providers (three new",
  "sourceUrl": "https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/g8221/Public%20reports%20pack%20Monday%2016-Mar-2026%2015.00%20Cabinet.pdf?T=10",
  "evidence": [
    {
      "page": 161,
      "text": "The procurement outcome has resulted in five providers (three new providers to this service in Southwark) being recommended for contract award"
    }
  ],
  "confidence": 0.84
}

The complete item includes the report URL, timestamps, amount and dates when stated, and all evidence passages. Public PDFs can contain OCR spacing or line breaks; the Actor preserves that source text rather than silently inventing a cleaner value.

Local development

npm install
npm test
npm run check
apify validate-schema .actor/input_schema.json
apify run

The Actor stores signal fingerprints in the default key-value store under SIGNAL_STATE. On recurring runs, unchanged signals are suppressed by default. Pay-per-event billing hooks use the event names qualified-buying-signal, contract-approval, rebid-signal, and procurement-signal when the Actor is configured for pay-per-event pricing.

Deployment

After authenticating the Apify CLI and choosing an Actor name or ID:

apify login
apify push <username>/<actor-name> --wait-for-finish 120

Focus the first UK source set on social care, housing maintenance, waste, IT and cybersecurity, highways, public transport, energy efficiency, construction, and facilities.