@pipeworx/uk-contracts

UK government procurement — what the public sector bought, who supplied it, and for how much — across both the general-tender Contracts Finder and the above-threshold Find a Tender Service. One pack, both sources (fleet #3244 confirmed this boundary rather than splitting them): they publish the same OCDS format under the same Cabinet Office programme, and Find a Tender is specifically the high-value tier of the same regime Contracts Finder covers.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1857+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• search_notices(keyword?, status?, notice_type?, published_from?, published_to?, limit?) — full-text search of Contracts Finder (title, description, awarded supplier), with real historical date filtering.

• get_notice(id) — full detail for one Contracts Finder notice.

• recent_notices(stage?, limit?) — most recent Contracts Finder notices, newest-first.

• find_a_tender_recent(keyword?, stage?, days?, limit?) — Find a Tender Service notices, newest-first within the requested window — now also usable for a historical window (days up to ~3660), not just "recent".

• find_a_tender_notice(ocid) — full detail for one Find a Tender Service notice.

Every response carries enough provenance to tell a complete scan from a partial one (total_matches / window_complete + scanned/pages_walked). A zero count is only trustworthy when the window was fully examined — see notes below.

Related MCP server: mcp-open-contracting

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• Cabinet Office, Contracts Finder — general UK public-sector procurement notices and awards, OCDS format.

• Cabinet Office, Find a Tender Service — above-threshold (high-value) UK public-sector procurement notices and awards, OCDS format; the post-Brexit replacement for the UK's share of EU TED.

Notes for the next person

Two APIs, and the search one is not the OCDS one (fleet #607). Contracts Finder's OCDS feed (/Published/Notices/OCDS/Search) is a date-ordered feed with NO text search — and it does not reject an unrecognised keyword parameter either, so a typo'd filter silently returns the unfiltered feed rather than erroring. The real search is a POST to the REST search endpoint with a searchCriteria object, which does proper server-side text search. Mind the silent criterion the same way: {keywords:[...]} (plural) or a bare top-level keyword both return the full, unfiltered hit count with a 200 — only the correctly-nested {searchCriteria:{keyword:...}} shape filters.

Mind the two id spaces. A search_notices hit's id is a bare GUID and 404s against the OCDS release endpoint; recent_notices returns an OCDS release id ({guid}-{seq}) instead. get_notice tries both forms for you.

Find a Tender Service has no server-side text search at all — its API rejects a keyword parameter outright, accepting only stages/limit/cursor/updatedFrom/updatedTo. find_a_tender_recent matches a keyword client-side over the pages it actually walks, bounded to 8 pages per call (FTS rate-limits at 12 requests/120 seconds) — window_complete:false means the walk stopped with more feed left, so a zero result means "absent from what was examined", not "not published".

The historical-reach cap on find_a_tender_recent's days argument was ours, not upstream's (fleet #3244). FTS's own updatedFrom accepts any date years back with no error — verified live. The argument used to clamp at 30, which silently refused anything older; it is now ~3660 (about 10 years), still subject to the same 8-page walk cap per call. For a proper full-corpus historical date range with no page-walk bound, use search_notices (Contracts Finder) instead — its date filtering is a real server-side query, not a bounded feed walk.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-contracts": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-contracts/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-contracts/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1857+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/uk_contracts_search_notices \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"keyword":"MRI","limit":20}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/uk_contracts_search_notices. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-uk-contracts is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/uk-contracts/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "uk-contracts": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-uk-contracts"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Uk Contracts data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT