The Ministry of Defence has awarded 4,130 new defence procurement contracts since the current government took office on 5 July 2024, and 3,680 of them, representing 89 per cent, went to companies located or headquartered in the United Kingdom, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard confirmed in a parliamentary answer on 23 April.
Pollard confirmed that 450 contracts, or 11 per cent of the total, went to companies based outside the UK, in response to a question from Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Dyke, who had asked how many contracts had gone to domestic manufacturers and what share had been outsourced overseas.
The headline figure doesn’t tell the whole story though. A separate parliamentary answer from September 2025 revealed that in the first year of the current government non-UK companies received an average contract value of around £17.2 million per award compared to around £13.6 million for UK-based firms, meaning overseas companies were winning fewer contracts but larger ones, and the April answer doesn’t break any of this down by value.
That gap reflects in part how some of the largest defence programmes are structured, where the prime contractor simply isn’t British. Lockheed Martin holds the F-35 contract, the Boxer armoured vehicle programme draws on German and Dutch industry and a range of munitions and electronic systems have no viable domestic supplier at all.
BAE Systems remained the single largest contractor to the MoD in 2023-24, receiving just over £6.7 billion, with the top ten suppliers between them accounting for around 39 per cent of all procurement expenditure.
Thanks for clarifying for everyone that the number of orders announcement isn’t the whole story. We need more responsible reporting like this.
All part of HMG spin though.
When pressed that the government have ordered next to nothing regards kit, they replied the other month that they’d placed over 4,000 contracts.
Whoopy do. The sort of contracts placed constantly, by all business, for anything from stationary to fixing light bulbs.
That is normal government department business, yet it was used as evidence they’re doing something about defence.
So, so poor.
They must know what contracts people are calling for. More kit, more people, more assets.