New data seen by WIRED provides a snapshot of Carillion's involvement with the government between 2011 and 2017. It shows 208 government bodies, known in procurement terminology as “buyers”, arranging contracts worth £5.7 billion with the failed contractor.
In the dataset, Carillion’s largest government customer during the seven year period is the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which arranged contracts worth £2.2bn.
The MoD’s largest spend was £408 million, in 2014, and at no point did it spend less than £200m annually with the firm. In 2016, for instance, it spent £362m; in 2017, that figure was £274m.
The figures are labelled with neither dates nor durations, so they indicates the department's historical relationship with Carillion, not its current exposure. An MoD spokesperson told WIRED that its existing contracts with the firm total between £750m and £1bn. Overall, the government has confirmed that it holds contracts worth 38 per cent of Carillion's 2016 revenue, or £1.9bn.
The dataset, provided by public procurement platforms OpenOpps and Open Contracting Partnership, is by no means complete, and may contain duplicates, but represents, to date, one of the most comprehensive records of Carillion's dealings with the UK government.
The data highlights the extent to which both local and central government relied on Carillion for the delivery of essential services. It shows 38 buyers from central government, including the Department for Transport (which made deals worth £377m) and the Department of Education (£154m).
The data also shows the extent of Carillion's contracts with local government. Between 2011 and 2018, all but one of England's 27 county councils had a contract with Carillion, as did all but two of London's 32 borough councils. In total during the period, 149 local government bodies spent £1.3bn on services from the firm.
The contractor’s largest local government client was Oxfordshire County Council, which spent £43m with the firm in 2016 and £10m in 2017. Its total spend across the six years was £136m.
Local government's other big spenders include Peterborough City Council, which spent £80m during the period, and Kent County Council, which spent £70m.
Other buyers featured in the data include healthcare providers, public companies or devolved administrations: the Welsh Assembly Government, for instance, arranged contracts worth £139m with Carillion during the period.
In 2017, as Carillion struggled with heavy debts after large losses on several building projects, the data shows government contracts totalling £450m. Lags in reporting, however, mean this information is estimated to be around 75 per cent complete. This is demonstrated by a very obvious omission – the contracts worth £2bn awarded to the firm in the last six months to date.
The government has been criticised for awarding three large deals to Carillion even after it issued profit warnings. One £1.4bn contract, for construction on High-Speed Rail 2, was awarded on July 17, just seven days after the firm made its first profit warning.
Government departments and agencies are legally obligated to disclose details of their contracts with private companies. However, there is no widely-used central database and the information is not published in a standard format. As a result, the OpenOpps dataset – which comes primarily from Tenders Electronic Daily, the European-wide record of public tenders and contract awards – is only a partial indication of the government’s relationship with Carillion.
“There’s no data for schools or universities and most NHS bodies don't publish,” says Ian Makgill, founder of OpenOpps. “I think we're missing 50 per cent of their spend.”
The difficulty in obtaining data on the contracts awarded to Carillion has prompted calls for the UK to follow countries such as Australia and create a full, open electronic registry for public contracts. “Data and due diligence are paramount when so much public money is involved,” says Gavin Hayman, executive director of Open Contracting Partnership, a non-profit which advocates using an open data standard to make it easier to track government contracts.
“Government, public bodies and businesses need to monitor their exposure and risks in real time and act before things go wrong rather than picking up the pieces afterwards, especially if failing firms try to bid their way out of trouble.”
