Find a Tender · Forecast
Office for National Statistics
Provision of Data on Commercial Shipping Services
Forecast: a planned procurement that is not yet at tender stage.
01/ The notice
Key facts
- Value
- £85,000Estimated value stated in the notice
- Deadline (UK time)
- No open deadlineA deadline does not apply to this forecast notice.
- Published
- 18 Mar 2026
- Region
- Not stated
02/ The brief
What the notice says
Not fully read: this is the notice text; attached documents are not read.
About the Office for National Statistics (ONS)
ONS is the UK's largest independent producer of official statistics and is the National Statistical Institute for the UK. Formally, it is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-Ministerial Department established by the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. It is responsible for collecting and publishing statistics related to the economy, population, and society at national, regional and local levels. ONS plays a leading role in national and international good practice in the production of official statistics.
Introduction
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has a need for reliable, comprehensive, and easy-to-use information about the transport services provided or received by the UK shipping fleet, including any goods purchased during, or to support, the provision of transport.
Overview
We require Quarterly and Annual estimates are required broken down by ship type covering:
- Passenger revenue collected outside the UK
- Freight revenue for transporting goods
- Charter receipts from a non-UK company
- Charter payments to a non-UK company
- Disbursements on bunkers/lubricants
- Disbursements on catering, ship stores and other goods
- Disbursements on services purchased
- Repair and maintenance costs
- Ship management fees
Disbursements are voyage-related expenses, mainly incurred when ships visit ports. Examples of the types of services purchased to include are:
- Cargo handling
- Warehousing/storage charges
- Port dues, pilotage, and towage,
- Canal dues (Suez, Panama etc.)
- Maintenance of shore establishments abroad
- Advances made to crews whilst abroad, whether UK nationals or not
- Other Services such as agency fees/commissions incurred abroad
It is essential for the data to be broken down into different ship types for both quarterly and annual data. Examples of ship types to include are:
- Container, Bulk carrier, and Other Dry Cargo
- Tanker and Liquefied Gas Carrier
- Offshore support vessels/non-cargo
- Cruise/Passenger ships and Roll-on Roll-off ferries
It is essential that the annual data can also be further broken-down by the:
- Load and unload country for freight data.
- Country the passenger revenue is collected from overseas or the residency of the non-UK passenger for passenger revenue.
- Country the disbursement is incurred in regardless of where the payment was made for all disbursements.
- Nationality of the company or the country the ship is being chartered to or from for the chartering data.
- Number of non-UK vessels managed by UK companies and UK vessels managed by non-UK owners for the ship management fees data.
The data will need to be sent in an excel/csv format. The quarterly data will need to be available one month after the quarter has ended and the annual data available five months after the year has ended.
The data collected will be used to derive and publish statistics on the provision of shipping services. These aggregated statistics feed into the calculation of UK Trade, Gross Domestic Product and Balance of Payments.
The types of organisations that should consider contacting us:
Any type of shipping company that can provide the information above
What can a contract with ONS offer?
An opportunity to work with a world class statistics organisation, to create better and more timely statistics to be used by all for the benefit of the public good. There is a possibility for this work to be funded if all requirements are met by the provider.
How to register
When you have expressed an interest, please submit a return to Sophie.keal@ons.gov.uk with the following information to allow ONS to have an understanding of what your company can offer. Please include as a minimum:
• Organisation Name
• Contact details
• Brief description of primary activity of organisation
• Type of data you can provide and support available
Any future tenders may be conducted through ONS's 'DPS Data SaSiE'. If you would like to sign up for this in readiness to receive any future tender packs, please search for the DPS title on the e-tendering portal and 'opt in'. This will take you through to the associated documentation for your organisation to apply.
Additional Information
This Exercise is NOT a pre-qualification or selection exercise and is NOT part of any pre-qualification or selection process that may apply to any future potential procurement. It is intended to act as an awareness and information gathering exercise offering an opportunity for suppliers to advise the extent to which they potentially can provide some or all the services that ONS may require, in order to help ONS with its future intentions.
03/ Classification
CPV codes
Common Procurement Vocabulary codes, exactly as the notice lists them. No descriptions are added here.
- 72300000
04/ History
Releases of this notice
One release held, oldest first. Dates are UK time.
- 18 Mar 2026Planning notice
Planning notice published 18 March 2026.
Release 024614-2026
View this release on Find a Tender (opens in a new tab)
05/ Limits
What the source does not tell us
- Only one release is held, so there is no change history.
06/ Questions
About this notice
08/ Related
Where to go next
These links follow a fixed rule applied to this notice’s buyer, text and CPV codes. They are not advice on whether to bid.
- Reference
- ocds-h6vhtk-066d9c
- Source
- Find a Tender
- Stage
- planning · Planning
- Last verified
- Sat 4 Apr 2026, 13:59 BST
- Read at
- Thu 29 Oct 2026, 05:20 GMT
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source data © Crown copyright.
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