Analysis

The second tier: contract notices whose buyer we cannot match to a public-authority register

Contracts Finder records a buyer on every notice. Most buyers are public authorities. Some do not match any register we hold: an organisation can hold its own Contracts Finder account, publish its own notices, and name its own suppliers. This page lists those notices. It does not say what any of these organisations is, and for most of them our data holds no payment record either way.

A notice on Contracts Finder names a buyer and, once awarded, a supplier. Read the usual way round, it shows a public authority paying a company. Some notices are the other way round: the buyer is an organisation that holds its own Contracts Finder account and names its own suppliers, and we cannot match that buyer to any public-authority register we hold.

Those notices sit outside the usual view of public spending. A search for what a given organisation was paid will not find them, because in these records that organisation is the one doing the buying.

Important: Every organisation named on this page is named because it appears in a published contract notice. Buyer and supplier names are the names printed on the notice; they are not identified companies, and appearing here is not evidence of any wrongdoing.

How identifiable a Contracts Finder buyer is

This is the measurement that shapes everything below, so it belongs at the top rather than in a footnote. Only a small share of notices carry a buyer identifier that comes from a government register. The rest carry a self-registered Contracts Finder or supplier account id and a free-text buyer name typed by the account holder.

Notices

135,407

Contracts Finder records held

Distinct buyer names

5,684

Free text, so one body can appear several times

6.7%

9,114 notices carry GB-GOR- or GB-LAE-

Link to the notice itself

19.7%

26,627 notices carry a direct URL

A register-backed identifier can prove a buyer is public. Nothing in this data can prove a buyer is not. That asymmetry is why this page describes what we could match rather than what any organisation is.

Buyers we could not match to a public-authority register

Nov 2016 to Aug 2026.

Buyers

1,554

of 5,684 buyer names

Notices

10,872

Published by those buyers

Awards

5,828

Notices at award stage

Supplier names recorded

4,328

Distinct names, counted once across the whole list

No total contract value is shown. The values on these notices are ceilings rather than payments, and single framework notices in this dataset run to hundreds of millions of pounds, so a total would be a misleading number rather than a useful one.

The matching rule

Every one of the 5,684 buyer names goes through the same six checks, in this order. The first check that matches removes the buyer from the list, and the count next to it is how many buyer names it removed. 4,130 of 5,684 buyer names matched a public authority at one of these steps; the remaining 1,554 did not.

#	Check	Buyer names removed
1	Buyer identifier comes from a government register (GB-GOR- or GB-LAE-)	212
2	Notice records the buyer as central government, a local authority, NHS, education or police	2,476
3	Name carries a public-body term (NHS, council, authority, university and similar)	683
4	Name carries a public-sector or collective-purchasing term	593
5	Name is on our curated list of public authorities that no register table we hold names	51
6	Name matches a row in public_bodies, organisations, local_councils or universities	115
	Buyer names left unmatched

Buyers whose name also appears as a paid supplier (700)

These buyer names also appear on the paid side of at least one public spending record we hold. That is a name match, not a verified identity, so each row carries the basis on which it was matched. Ranked by number of awards, never by value.

#	Buyer (name as published)	Awards	Notices	Supplier names	First notice	Latest notice	Also appears as a paid supplier in	Basis of that match
1	THIRTEEN HOUSING GROUP LIMITED	200	202	171	Dec 2023	Aug 2026	council spending	possible match (by name)
2	BIP SOLUTIONS LIMITED

Buyers with no paid-side record in our data (854)

These buyer names publish notices but do not appear as a supplier in the spending records we hold. That means our data does not contain a payment record under this name. It does not mean the organisation is not paid from public funds: our central-government spend covers four departments, our council spending covers part of England, and an organisation paid under a different legal name would not match.

#	Buyer (name as published)	Awards	Notices	Supplier names	First notice	Latest notice
1	DIGITAL DEFENCE LIMITED	179	179	101	Oct 2024	Jun 2025
2	CENTRE FOR PROCESS INNOVATION LIMITED	102	119	97	Nov 2016	Aug 2026
3

Most recently published awards from these buyers

Every supplier name below is the name printed on the notice. It has not been resolved to a company, and the identifier on these notices is a Contracts Finder account id, not a Companies House number. Values are the notified contract value: a ceiling, not a payment. Ordered by the date the notice was published, which is a fact about the record; some notices carry an award date in the future.

Notice published	Buyer (as published)	Supplier (as published)	What for	Notified value (ceiling)	Award date on notice	Source
12 Aug 2026	Category Manager	The Fulker Consultancy Limitednotice records this supplier as an SME	Building consultancy services	£39k	2 Aug 2026	OCID only
12 Aug 2026	THIRTEEN HOUSING GROUP LIMITED	Forbes Solicitors LLPnotice records this supplier as an SME

Advertised value and awarded value, as published

Where the same buyer published one tender notice and one award notice under an identical title, both figures are shown with their dates. Titles the buyer published more than once on either side are left out, because one advertised figure beside one of several awards would understate the award side. Both figures are notified values from the notices. A difference between them is normal in procurement and is shown without comment: the two figures measure different things at different points in a process.

Buyer (as published)	Notice title	Advertised	Advertised on	Awarded	Award published	Supplier (as published)
Hastoe Housing Association	GB-Plymouth: MW2327 - Chichester House - Electrical Works	£100k	25 Jul 2024	£134k	26 Feb 2026	Westcountry Maintenance Services Ltd
Plymouth Community Homes Limited	Provision of Insurance and related services to Plymouth Community Homes Limited

Supplier names recorded most often beneath these buyers

Names as published on the notices, ranked by how many awards carry them. The same company can appear more than once where notices spell its name differently, and two different organisations can share a name, so these are counts of names rather than of companies.

#	Supplier name (as published)	Awards	Buyers	Basis
1	KPMG LLP	22	8	reported supplier name
2	Phoenix Software Limited	17	8	reported supplier name
3	Marsh Limited	15	15

Methodology and limitations

Every notice in our Contracts Finder holding is grouped by its buyer name. Each buyer name is put through six checks in order: a register-backed buyer identifier (GB-GOR- or GB-LAE-); a public buyer type recorded on the notice; a public-body term in the name; a public-sector or collective-purchasing term in the name; a hand-maintained list of public authorities our register tables do not name; and an exact match against public_bodies, organisations, local_councils and universities after normalisation. Names are normalised with the shared company-name normaliser: upper case, ampersands spelled out, punctuation stripped, a leading "The" dropped and legal forms canonicalised to LTD, PLC or LLP. A buyer that survives all six checks is listed here. Its normalised name is then looked up on the paid side of three datasets: Contracts Finder supplier records, the central-government £25,000 spend file, and council spending. A hit means a record exists under that name; it is not proof of identity.

Not matching a register does not make a buyer a private company. The pool contains government-owned companies, housing associations, arm's-length management organisations, local-authority trading companies, procurement consortia and organisations publishing notices on behalf of clients. We publish the matching state, not a verdict on what the organisation is.
The paid-side check is a name match. Two organisations can share a name, and one organisation can be paid under a different legal name, so a match is a possible match and a miss is not proof of absence.
Spending rows our own loader has quarantined, such as cumulative republished files, are excluded from the paid-side check. They are records we have already judged not countable, so they cannot stand as evidence that an organisation was paid.
The advertised-versus-awarded table only pairs a title the same buyer published exactly once as a tender and exactly once as an award, with the award published on or after the tender. Anything published more than once on either side is left out rather than paired.

Source: Contracts Finder (OCDS notices)as of 17 Aug 2026

Paid-side checks use our own holdings of Contracts Finder supplier records, the central-government £25,000 spend files and council spending. Coverage of the latter two is partial and is described on the coverage page.

Machine-readable version of this page: /api/analysis/subcontracts.

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