Who wins Defence & Security public contracts — and for how much

Methodology

Built from official notices published on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, TED, eTenders Ireland, NHS Atamis and the major procurement portal families, under their open licences. Notices describing the same procurement are collapsed to one canonical record before counting.

What a supplier is credited with. Only a value the publishing buyer stated was theirs: their own itemised amount, or the whole contract value where they were the single named supplier. Three things are therefore counted but never valued — an award naming several suppliers with no published split, a framework ceiling restated across the suppliers appointed to it, and an award notice that names a winner without publishing what they won (there, the figure on the notice is the pre-award estimate, not an outcome). Nothing is split evenly and nothing is estimated, so a £60m framework with ten winners never becomes £600m — and equally, these boards understate any supplier whose buyers publish vaguely.

What a total leaves out. Two things are published as awards but are not new money, and adding them counts a contract twice. A contract amendment republishes the whole value of a contract already awarded — one NHS commissioner issues one each time a block contract changes, and thirty-three of them named a single hospital trust. And a figure so far out of scale with everything its own buyer has ever awarded that it cannot be a contract that buyer placed — a debris-removal research service published at £61bn, a thousand times its department's entire history. Both are kept on the notice exactly as published, with the link to prove it, because that is what the buyer said. Neither is added to a total, because a total is our claim rather than theirs.

How companies are grouped. A company's published spellings are grouped together: case, punctuation and the optional “Ltd” are ignored. Anything that marks a different organisation is kept — an LLP, a plc, a CIC and a Teoranta are separate businesses from a Ltd of the same name, and a parent is never rolled up with a named subsidiary. Where the rule is arguable we split rather than merge, because showing a firm fewer of its own awards is a smaller error than publishing someone else's under its name. Where two rows on a board differ only by legal form or a bracketed qualifier — “Northgate Civils Ltd” beside “Northgate Civils (UK) Ltd” — a chip marks each as possibly the same organisation. That is a hint for the reader, not a merge: the rows keep their own ranks and their values are never combined.

Frameworks. A framework's published value is a ceiling — the maximum that may be called off over its life, not money awarded — so it is reported as capacity, separately, and never added to awarded value. One Crown Commercial Service framework alone states £120bn; counting ceilings as spend put £1,660bn on this page for a twelve-month window of a market that spends around £400bn a year. Where a buyer publishes what an individual supplier was actually allocated under a framework, that allocation IS counted for them — which is why the supplier column can exceed awarded value on a sector heavy in frameworks.

Currency, dates and sectors. Sterling and euro are never summed or converted — league tables rank on £-priced value with € shown alongside, and where a publisher omits the currency it is read from the country of the notice. Award dates use the published award date, falling back to notice publication. A sector filter is inclusive (a notice appears if any of its CPV codes belong to that sector); a company's own sector split files each award once, under the division most of its codes belong to, so the split sums to their total. The linked source notice remains authoritative for every record.

Frequently asked

Where does this data come from?

Every official UK and Ireland publication surface we ingest: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, TED, eTenders Ireland, NHS Atamis and the major portal families — deduplicated so one procurement counts once, with the source linked on every record.

How often does it update?

Each source is collected on its own schedule, and these tables are recomputed from the full store out of band rather than on each visit. The 'Data to' line above states exactly when the numbers you are reading were taken, and the coverage page shows when each source last synced successfully — if collection has paused, that is where it shows.

Why do some awards show no value?

Not every award notice publishes a contract value. Unpriced awards still count in the volume columns, and each table states how many rows were unpriced — we never estimate or infer values.

A supplier I know won a big framework shows a small value — why?

Because the notice didn't say what their share was. When an award names several suppliers without publishing a split, we count it against each of them but attribute no value — dividing a framework ceiling between winners would be a guess. Those awards appear in the 'shared' count next to the value.

Are supplier names grouped by parent company?

No. A company's own published spellings are grouped — case, punctuation and an optional “Ltd” — but a group and its named subsidiaries stay separate, as do an LLP, a plc, a CIC and a Teoranta of the same name, because those are different registered organisations bidding for different work. Where the rule is arguable we split rather than merge: showing a firm fewer of its own awards is a smaller error than publishing another firm's awards under its name. Rows that differ only by legal form or a bracketed qualifier carry a “possibly the same as” chip so you can see the split; their values are never combined.