Public contracts

Reading public contract notices

Contracts Finder is where public bodies in Britain have to announce what they are buying and who they bought it from. It is genuinely open — Open Contracting data, published under the Open Government Licence — and almost unusable for the question people actually have, because it publishes notices rather than suppliers. You can look up a contract. You cannot look up a company and see what it has been paid.

That is the gap this fills, and it fills it honestly. A quarter of notices state the supplier’s Companies House number; the rest give a name and an address. An award is attached to a company page only when the buyer identified the company, so a total on a company page is a floor — real money, certainly awarded, and certainly not all of it.

The largest numbers here need reading twice. A framework agreement is a ceiling shared between everyone appointed to it, published in full against each of them — so the headline totals on this site cover single-supplier awards only, and frameworks are counted rather than summed. A firm that won a place on a two-billion-pound framework has won the right to compete for work under it, which is not the same as two billion pounds.

Read the figure as the size of an announced deal rather than as spending. A contract can end early, be extended, or be spent well under its ceiling, and none of that comes back to the notice. Where the award date sits long before the publication date, that gap is itself worth a look.

What is missing entirely is everything below the publication thresholds. A great deal of public money is spent in amounts too small to announce, so the small end of this data is thin in a way that is not visible from inside it.