The Ministry of Defence (MOD) recently addressed several parliamentary questions regarding its procurement processes, highlighting both the limitations of its data tracking and ongoing efforts to refine its systems.
In a response to Rebecca Paul, Conservative MP for Reigate, Defence Minister Maria Eagle stated:
“The Department does not record within our systems directly where a contract is manufactured or the location of the supplier manufacturing. The Department does, however, collect the prime location of the contract as marked by the contract owner on the Contract Purchasing and Finance system (CP&F) when the contract is first created.”
From December 2023 to December 2024, the MOD created 2,266 contracts in its CP&F commercial system. Of these, only 583 (26%) were marked with a known location. Within this subset, 91% (531 contracts) were identified as having a UK prime contract location, while 9% (52 contracts) were associated with foreign countries.
By value, the data shows £3.85 billion of the £20.68 billion total contract value (19%) had a known location, with 78% of this (£2.99 billion) tied to UK-based contracts.
The lack of precise data on the location of contract manufacturing poses challenges for evaluating the alignment of defence spending with the government’s stated goals to boost domestic manufacturing. The response emphasises the importance of the UK’s defence manufacturing industry, noting:
“The UK’s defence manufacturing industry is vital not only to our national security but to our prosperity and economic growth.”
In related questions, Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, sought updates on the implementation of the NATO test across procurement decisions. The NATO test is intended to ensure procurement aligns with strategic defence objectives, particularly interoperability with NATO allies.
Maria Eagle confirmed that implementation work is ongoing, stating:
“The detail on metrics or evaluation remains under active consideration, but the work overall is being conducted under close oversight by the Permanent Secretary and Ministers, including through regular updates to the Defence Board.”
She further clarified that these updates will continue throughout and after implementation to ensure the process remains effective and meets the MOD’s objectives.
The absence of precise information on where contracts are executed limits transparency and accountability in defence procurement. While the MOD collects information on the prime location of contracts, the lack of detail on manufacturing locations could hinder assessments of the government’s commitment to fostering domestic manufacturing capabilities.
Really odd that a database field isn’t being populated.
There will be a process reason for that or is the data being pulled form another DB(s) that doesn’t use that field.
I think there will be a logical reason for it?
My first thoughts on this went around in circles a bit
my first thought on this was why the hell not as this is money that needs to be worked hard and not only should it be buying equipment but it should also be used to stimulate the military industrial sector as that’s important, also any money spent in the UK is almost all recycled into tax take for further spend later.
My second thought was well that will actually be to complicated because the supply chains will be all over the world and how could you track where individual components come from…..which led to my final thought on political warfare and Maos “ on extended warfare”
If you have no idea where stuff is coming from in your supply chain especially for military hardware, your enemy can suborn that supply chain and essentially either disrupt as ongoing political warfare or when it decides it’s time to engage in kinetic warfare cut your supply chain at the critical moment. This is the reason china has estimated to have lost 1-2% in growth rate over that last five years as it secures all its supply chains…in a none military but great political warfare example we can see shein fashion as an attack on regional economies…..every bit of fabric, dyes, buttons, zip ect comes from china it’s an enclosed supply chain and unsurprisingly it’s now in the middle of disrupting all the other cloth producers, because it produces its garments even cheaper than Indian and Bangladeshi sweat shops….and has control of the wider supply chain.
If the contract is to produce something with significant security implications then it will be onshore with appropriately cleared staff as a matter of course, unless it’s done under a MOU with another (normally 5 Eyes) state. Relatively mundane procurement of materiel would not be so constrained, so those would be the areas where the lack of transparency is more significant. Procurement is not all centralised under the CP&F system anyway, and unless the information has security implications it is unlikely that anyone has been particularly inclined to scrutinise it before.
Nothing complicated is built in one place. Everything has subcomponents and eventually raw materials that are all sourced from different countries. There’s also the issue of parts that come from multiple alternative sources, so two apparently identical items might have a slighlty different country make up. This is not usually transparent to MOD. The bill of materials and the suppliers in the chain are often held as trade secrets, because manufacturers don’t want to be cut out after having put in the sourcing work and built the relationships within the supply chain. I’d like to see percentage of value-add by country travel with all components and subcomponents, but at the moment it doesn’t.