Where the money numbers come from
Two registers, both published by the state, both under the Open Government Licence. Everything on these pages is copied from them and recalculated — nothing is estimated, and nothing is editorialised.
Contract awards
Source: Contracts Finder, the Cabinet Office's public procurement register, read through its OCDS API.
What it covers: award notices — contracts that have actually been awarded, with the buyer, the supplier, the value, the dates and the delivery region. Public bodies in England must publish contracts above £12,000 (£30,000 for wider public sector bodies) here; central government publishes more.
How often: checked every fifteen minutes. New awards appear within a cycle of being published.
On file now: 98260 awards worth £834,669,601,963, from notices published between 4 July 2024 and 4 August 2026. The archive is complete back to the start of this Parliament.
Framework agreements: the largest values on the register are usually frameworks — a maximum that any number of public bodies may spend over several years, often split between dozens or hundreds of suppliers. A £5bn framework is a ceiling, not a payment. Nothing here converts a published value into "money spent", because the notices do not say that and neither will this page.
What it is not: 98260 contract awards are not the public finances. Salaries, pensions, benefits, grants, debt interest and day-to-day departmental running costs are not contracts and never appear here. Neither do most contracts let by the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government or Northern Ireland departments, which use their own portals, nor anything genuinely classified. 2790 of the awards on file carry no published value at all, so every total here understates rather than overstates.
Political donations
Source: the Electoral Commission's register of donations and loans.
What it covers: donations and non-cash benefits accepted by registered parties, and by individual MPs and other regulated donees, above the statutory reporting thresholds. Cash, gifts in kind, sponsorships, visits and public funds are all included and labelled by type.
How often: the whole register is re-downloaded once a day and replaces what was held, so corrections and withdrawals upstream take effect here too.
On file now: 5421 declarations worth £118,989,847, of which 778 were made to individual MPs (£7,418,534). 758 have been matched by name to a sitting MP's page.
What it is not: a complete picture of money in politics. Donations below the thresholds are never reported. Money paid to a party's local unit, spending by campaign groups that are not registered third parties, and anything routed through an unincorporated association whose own funders are undeclared, all stop the trail here.
How the two are matched — and how they are not
Donations are attached to an MP's page only when the name on the register normalises exactly to a sitting MP's name, after honorifics and a trailing "MP" are stripped. Where two MPs would normalise to the same name, neither is matched: a wrong attribution is worse than a missing link.
Companies and public bodies are grouped by their name, because Contracts Finder carries no identifier present on every notice. This over-merges occasionally and under-merges more often, and the raw notice is always linked so you can check.
Where a supplier name and a donor name coincide, both are shown on the same page and labelled as two separate published facts. This service never asserts that a donation bought a contract. It puts the register entries next to each other, which is the thing that was hard to do before, and leaves the reading to you.
Everything else
The rest of the Watchdog — voting records, attendance, declared interests — has its own sources page. How the MP numbers are worked out →