National statistics

MOD trade, industry and contracts: 2021

Information on Ministry of Defence spending with industry and commerce.

Documents

Details

This bulletin provides figures on the composition and scope of the department’s expenditure, information on the impact of defence spending on the wider economy, and compares the MOD’s spending to that of other departments and other countries.

Removal of tables

In the 2021 publication, the following table has been removed as updates to the underlying data are no longer published by HM Treasury, and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.

  • Future planned Private Finance Initiative (PFI) unitary charge payments.

Additionally, after being omitted since 2018, the table detailed below has now been fully discontinued from the Trade, Industry and Contracts bulletin.

  • MOD estimated balance of payments for trade in services.

Reinstation of tables

The following tables and related figures were removed in 2018 as they did not meet the quality standards required for an Official Statistics publication due to data quality issues:

  • New contracts let with Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.
  • Direct expenditure with Small and Medium-sized Enterprises.

Data is now at a sufficiently improved level to resume publication, albeit presented in a new format. Details on new contracts with SMEs are once again presented in the Trade, Industry and Contracts bulletin while direct expenditure with SMEs are incorporated into releases of MOD’s Regional Expenditure with UK Industry and Supported Employment bulletin from 2022 onwards.

Revisions

A scheduled revision of 2021’s Trade, Industry and Contracts bulletin was made in February 2022. This provided an update on the latest UK Defence and Security Export statistics which were unavailable at the time of initial publication.

In the same revision, the competition and SME status of newly placed contracts in 2020/21 were also reassessed. This update addressed issues on late reporting of contracts and where data was not of sufficient quality to previously produce a competitive/non-competitive split for any new contracts. Added data quality also means it is now possible to present the split of new contracts with SMEs by competition type (Tables 6c and 6d). Previously, the SME data was presented in a single table containing details on the total value and number of contracts with SMEs only.

Should you have any comments regarding any of these changes or revisions then please email Analysis-Expenditure-PQ-FOI@mod.gov.uk.

Published 16 September 2021
Last updated 3 February 2022 + show all updates
  1. Scheduled revision of MOD Trade, Industry and Contracts: 2021.

  2. First published.