DefenceLens

Data methodology

Sources

DefenceLens is built on official government procurement publications: UK public procurement notices and defence innovation competitions and, on the Prime plan, EU defence and security notices. Periscope, our intelligence engine, collects them and links every notice back to its official source. We publish what governments publish: no scraped rumour, no editorialising of the record. UK data contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. EU data © European Union.

Update cadence

Periscope checks its sources for new and updated notices every 30 minutes, around the clock. Award and winner records are extracted as notices arrive, so contract awards appear on the platform the same day the government publishes them — not in a quarterly or annual review cycle.

DefenceLens has screened 206,133 UK procurements. 10,097 are defence & security, of which 4,821 are core defence. It tracks 3,190 UK defence contract awards, naming 2,046 companies with defence wins. Continuous coverage runs from May 2026. A procurement is one buying exercise, however many notices it publishes; EU data is excluded from these figures.

Figures updated 25 Oct 2026, 16:01 · Data since May 2026 · UK only; EU (TED) coverage is on Prime

How notices are classified as defence

Buyers frequently mis-tag procurement categories, so no single signal is trusted on its own. Periscope scores every notice against several independent defence signals — how the notice is categorised, who is buying, and what the notice actually describes — and only notices that clear its threshold are classified as defence.

Every defence-classified notice carries its classification reasons on the notice page, so you can see why it was included, not just that it was.

Coverage and limitations

  • What’s covered: official UK public procurement notices — pipeline/planning notices, tenders and contract awards, followed through their full lifecycle — plus UK defence innovation competitions; and EU defence & security notices across all 27 member states (Prime plan).
  • What isn’t (yet): opportunities visible only to registered suppliers on the MOD Defence Sourcing Portal or prime contractors’ supplier portals; national-only portals in other European countries; NATO agency notices (on our roadmap). Some defence work is never published at all — for example contracts exempt on national-security grounds, or call-offs under frameworks that need no award notice — so no public-data service can show it.
  • Inherent gaps in the public record: the MOD is exempt from publishing some information where disclosure would compromise national security, and some awards are published late or with missing values. DefenceLens reflects the official record — it does not estimate or infer figures the government has not published.
  • Classification is probabilistic: a scored model occasionally includes a borderline civil notice or misses a defence-relevant one. Classification reasons are shown so errors are visible; corrections ship in reclassification runs across the whole corpus.

Citing DefenceLens

Journalists, researchers and analysts are welcome to cite DefenceLens figures with attribution (“Source: DefenceLens, defencelens.co.uk”) and a link to the page the figure came from. Underlying notice data remains Crown copyright under OGL v3.0. For bespoke cuts of the data, contact us.

See also: the free UK Defence Contract Awards Tracker, the MOD tenders guide and the defence procurement glossary.