DefenceLens

Data methodology

Sources

UK notice data is sourced from the UK Find a Tender service (FTS) — the UK’s legally mandated home for public procurement notices under the Procurement Act 2023 — consumed in the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) format and used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. EU notice data is sourced from Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) — the official journal of EU public procurement — scoped to defence & security notices under Directive 2009/81/EC and defence CPV codes, and available on the Prime plan. Every notice on DefenceLens links back to its official source. We publish what governments publish: no scraped rumour, no editorialising of the record.

Update cadence

DefenceLens polls Find a Tender and TED for new and updated releases every 30 minutes, around the clock. Award and winner records are extracted from award notices as they are ingested, so contract awards appear on the platform the same day the government publishes them — not in a quarterly or annual review cycle.

As of the last scan, DefenceLens tracks 24,720 UK and EU notices, of which 2,980 are classified defence & security.

How notices are classified as defence

Buyers frequently mis-tag procurement categories, so no single signal is trusted on its own. Each notice is scored by a three-layer model:

  • CPV codes — strong defence prefixes (35 military and security equipment, 7522 defence services, 7340/7341 defence R&D) qualify a notice alone; ambiguous prefixes that civil buyers also use (for example fire-fighting equipment or generic test-and-evaluation codes) only count with corroboration.
  • Buyer identity — a maintained whitelist of defence buyers: Ministry of Defence, DE&S, Dstl, DIO, AWE, SDA, DASA, Defence Digital, UK Strategic Command and the armed services.
  • Domain keywords — military, munitions, radar, sonar, avionics and similar terms in the title or description, used as corroboration rather than proof.

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: notices published on Find a Tender — pipeline/planning notices, tenders and contract awards — for the UK, followed through their full lifecycle via OCDS identifiers; and EU defence & security notices published on TED across all 27 member states (Prime plan), scoped to Directive 2009/81/EC and defence CPV codes.
  • What isn’t (yet): opportunities published only on the MOD Defence Sourcing Portal or other below-threshold channels; civil EU procurement outside the defence scope; NATO (NSPA) notices are on the roadmap.
  • 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.