A year-long investigation by Exposed News, drawing on procurement records obtained under FOI, Companies House data, Land Registry filings, and the Electoral Commission’s donations register, has identified £180 million in contracts awarded by 48 English local authorities to companies with undisclosed connections to serving council members, senior officers, or their immediate family members.
In 34 of the 48 cases, the contracts were awarded without competitive tender under “direct award” provisions, which councils may invoke when they determine a procurement is below threshold, urgent, or involves specialist services with a limited market. The Procurement Act 2023 tightened the conditions for direct award; the contracts identified were awarded before its provisions came fully into force in February 2025.
Methodology
Exposed News cross-referenced contract award notices published on Contracts Finder — the government’s mandatory transparency platform — against directorships, shareholdings, and addresses drawn from Companies House. We then checked declared interests in council meeting minutes and registers of interests held by monitoring officers. Where a contract recipient shared a director, shareholder, registered address, or family name with a council member or senior officer, and no declaration appeared in the relevant register, we flagged the case for further investigation.
We identified 127 such cases. Of these, 89 involved contracts where the connection was subsequently confirmed — either through the council’s own response to our enquiries or through Companies House documents — but had not been declared at the time of award.
Examples
Among the cases identified: a district council in the East Midlands awarded a £2.1 million waste management contract to a firm whose majority shareholder is the brother-in-law of the council’s director of environment. The director did not declare a personal interest. A London borough awarded a £4.4 million IT modernisation contract to a company co-founded by a former council officer who had left the authority six weeks before the contract was let; the officer’s successor on the procurement panel had been hired from the same company two years earlier.
The Local Government Association told Exposed News that councils operated under “robust” procurement rules and that isolated failures did not reflect systemic weakness. The government’s counter-fraud function, the Public Sector Fraud Authority, said it was “not in a position to comment on specific cases.”