No running register of the contracts government hands out without competition

Single-source and direct awards under defence, security and 'technical' exemptions are individually published on Find a Tender, but nobody keeps a running, searchable register of them, so the pattern stays invisible. The Ministry of Defence's £240.6m Palantir award in December 2025 was a direct award covering all security classifications; the Metropolitan Police's proposed Palantir deal was blocked in May 2026 partly over how it had been let. Each sits on the record alone, and nobody reads them together. Surfaced by The Synthetic State (syntheticstate.netlify.app), a pseudonymous self-published investigation; the underlying facts here are cited to primary sources, not to that synthesis.

Competition is the main defence against waste and capture in public spending. When the exceptions are never counted, a habit of uncompeted awards to the same suppliers can grow with no one able to see it happening.

An open register that scrapes Find a Tender for exemption-based awards, tracks value, supplier and justification, and flags repeat single-source awards: a civic-tech build from public data available today.

// Build now: First artefact: an open register scraping Find a Tender for exemption-based awards; all source data is public.

Uncompeted awards are published individually but never aggregated, so repeat single-source patterns stay invisible; the register is buildable today from public data yet nobody is resourced to run it.