£2.5bn is moving to SMEs - and the CMA is watching defence bids

Commercial significance: The CMA wants losing-bid data collected across the public sector and screened for collusion, and says it is already working with the MOD on defence procurement data. Relevant to: anyone who teams, subcontracts or prices against a known rival

One government approach to buying space technology

Commercial significance: The UK Space Strategy commits £7.8 billion to 2030 and says government will, for the first time, take a single approach to buying and developing space technology, starting with satellite communications. Relevant to: satellite communications, ground segment and space domain awareness

An A400M extension landed 28 per cent under estimate

Commercial significance: The direct award to Airbus settled at £189.8 million excluding VAT against £265 million published at transparency stage last October. Earliest signature 21 September. Relevant to: air support, maintenance, airworthiness and estimate-led pricing

On 8 September the Competition and Markets Authority published Procurement in the national interest, two reports on how government buys and on bid rigging. The substance is a data proposal. The CMA wants bid rigging named as a priority in the National Procurement Policy Statement; contracting authorities to collect bid-level information in machine-readable form, including losing bids, which the Central Digital Platform does not currently capture; and its Bid Rigging Intelligence Tool run across that data at scale. The tool reads structural indicators such as concentration and barriers to entry, and behavioural ones such as patterns in who bids and who wins. Pilots at three departments have, in the CMA's words, "begun to generate live enforcement opportunities".

Defence sits at the centre of it. The CMA names the MOD as the largest single central government spender on procurement and says it is "progressing work with the MOD on measures to reduce its exposure to bid rigging by applying data science techniques". It is separately advising the department to preserve rivalry by "supporting multiple credible challengers rather than creating dependence on a single preferred supplier", and asking government to review major procurement requirements "for their impact on entry, scale-up growth and competition". These are recommendations. Nothing changes the law this week.

Business Winning Angle: Bid behaviour is becoming a dataset. A screening tool cannot see why the same three firms appear in the same lots, why a partner declined to bid or why two prices moved together. It sees the pattern, and a person looks afterwards. Thin markets throw up those patterns lawfully, and the answer to a pattern is a contemporaneous record: a competition-law protocol for teaming discussions, a log of who saw which pricing information and when, and bid or no-bid decisions documented at the time. Firms with two or three habitual partners have the strongest case for putting that in place. The package cuts the other way too, because the entry and scale-up recommendation is a citable argument when a qualification gate excludes a capable supplier, as VENTURE's does below. Note too that the CMA's screening-pilot invitation is addressed to public sector bodies and not to their suppliers.

At Mansion House on 9 September the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard, restated the target of a 50 per cent increase in MOD spend with small and medium-sized firms by summer 2028, which he put at "moving an extra two and a half billion pounds".

The newer material was the financing around it: a Defence Investment Unit, created "because investors need a clearer interface with defence"; a Defence Finance Investment Strategy to follow the autumn budget, setting "a clear framework for how government and responsible private capital can work together"; and a defence investment summit in December. He also cited the Defence Office of Small Business Growth, the regional defence and security clusters, and the Defence Unicorn Fund, under which 13 British startups took contracts of up to £4 million in May. No competition was announced and no money allocated.

Business Winning Angle: A spend target is an outcome, not a route to market, and two things follow. For firms raising capital, the Finance Investment Strategy lands just after the autumn budget, which is when the framework investors will apply becomes public; defence revenue evidence, contract coverage and security posture are better in order before that than after. For firms chasing work, the target is measured in spend, and most MOD spend reaches smaller firms through prime supply chains rather than direct contracts. That makes a prime's SME reporting a lever worth pulling. Ask how your work is being counted towards the department's figure, because the answer tends to reveal where that prime is under the most pressure to place work.

Project VENTURE, RAF gliding - £50m ex VAT | register by 25 Sept Preliminary market engagement notice 085542-2026, published 9 September by Air Command. Gliding equipment, maintenance, spares and support across ten sites for the RAF Air Cadets, running from April 2028 to March 2035 with an option to 2040. The industry day is on 6 October at RAF Syerston and registration closes at 17:00 on 25 September. Attendance is gated on either a UK MOD contract worth £5 million or more within three years, or gliding work within the last twelve months.

Project Ubiquity, FPV drones - £3m ex VAT | interest by 2 Oct Preliminary market engagement notice 085800-2026, published 10 September by Army Headquarters. First person view (FPV) small uncrewed aircraft with training systems, ground control stations, batteries and spares, for Army training and force development, running from January 2027 for a year with an option. The notice names it as suitable for smaller firms and applies no eligibility test at all.

HMS Cassandra oil removal - £30m ex VAT | RFI closes 16 Oct Request for information 084907-2026, published 8 September by the National Armaments Director Group. Removal of the oil remaining on a First World War cruiser lying at around 95 metres off the Estonian coast, in two stages: a viability assessment of hull integrity, then removal under environmental safeguards. The tender is estimated for April 2027 and the contract for April 2028.

Business Winning Angle: All three are engagement rather than competition, which is when a requirement can still change, and each applies a different gate. VENTURE gates on track record, the exact barrier the CMA asked government to review this week, so an excluded supplier has a policy argument to put in writing before 25 September rather than a grievance afterwards. Ubiquity gates on nothing and says so, which usually means the customer has not settled what it wants; requirements in that state get shaped by whoever arrives with a clear account of what good looks like. Cassandra is a question of sequencing, because the viability work will shape the method, scope and feasibility of whatever follows it.

Published on 8 September, contract award notice 084800-2026 records a direct award from Defence Equipment and Support to Airbus Military Sociedad Limitada, extending A400M Atlas in-service support at £189,823,013 excluding VAT under the defence and security regime of the Procurement Act 2023. The scope is base maintenance, line and line support, and continuing airworthiness management. The contract runs to 30 April 2029, a core term of two years and seven months, with a twelve-month option taking the total to three years and seven months. The earliest signature date is 21 September.

The number moved. The transparency notice for the same procurement, 068121-2025 of 24 October 2025, published £265 million excluding VAT for the same scope and the same dates. The award is about £75.2 million lower, around 28 per cent below the estimate, and neither notice explains why. Two smaller points. Both notices report identical excluding and including VAT figures, so the VAT treatment is worth confirming before the inclusive figure is used. And while the award notice carries no justification of its own, the 2025 transparency notice set out the Schedule 5 case in full: Airbus as original equipment manufacturer and design authority, exclusive access to the technical data, Military Aviation Authority compliance, and an aircraft still undergoing substantial change.

Business Winning Angle: Two years and seven months, or three years and seven months with the option, puts the next competitive moment in 2029 or 2030. Until then the openings sit beneath the prime rather than against it, and an extension of this length gives that supply chain a settled requirement to qualify into. On 21 September the contract can first be signed: a claim brought and notified during the applicable standstill period can trigger automatic suspension, while later remedies are more limited. The most portable lesson is the estimate itself. A published figure is a planning number, and this one fell by more than a quarter between transparency notice and award, worth remembering the next time a published estimate anchors your own pricing assumptions.

Goodwin plc announced on 9 September that it has agreed to sell most of its mechanical engineering division to Cerberus Capital Management for up to approximately £1.1 billion in cash: Goodwin Steel Castings, Goodwin International, Noreva GmbH, the Easat Group and the pumps division. They serve defence, aerospace, nuclear, power and mining, and produced revenue of £210.3 million and operating profit of £70.2 million in the year to 30 April 2026, with completion of the sale expected in the first quarter of 2027 against a long stop date of 6 June 2027.

The defence relevance is the large castings and machined components for naval and nuclear applications, and Easat's radar. The announcement states the transaction requires National Security and Investment Act clearance alongside foreign direct investment and antitrust approvals. Trade coverage links the businesses to submarine programmes and to AUKUS; the company names no programmes or customers, so we would treat that as reporting rather than record.

Business Winning Angle: For anyone buying from or selling to these businesses, a change of control with a twelve-month path to completion is when pricing, capacity allocation and long-term agreements get reopened. Waiting for completion means negotiating after the new owner has fixed its plan, so the productive window is now, while incumbent management still has authority. More broadly, that a casting, valve and radar group needs NSI clearance is useful context for where the sensitivity line currently sits, and firms in forgings, precision machining, valves and radar can draw on it when asked to evidence resilience or UK control. Context, not precedent: it says nothing about how any particular company will be treated.

The UK Space Strategy, published 8 September, replaces the 2021 National Space Strategy and sets out £7.8 billion of investment to 2030: about £2.8 billion for connectivity and about £880 million for space control and intelligence, with smaller lines including £149 million for the ESA Vigil mission and £85 million for the National Space Operations Centre. Named programmes include Connectivity in Low Earth Orbit and SKYNET.

The commercially significant line is about method rather than money. Government states that "for the first time, government will take a single approach to buying and developing space technology, starting with satellite communications", and says this will help "British firms win more work". No framework, route to market or common qualification has been announced, and the strategy does not describe one.

Business Winning Angle: Today a supplier sells separately to defence, to the civil programme and to departments buying their own connectivity, each with its own route and standards. If the single approach becomes a common route to market, the qualification that matters becomes the shared one, and firms visible to the people designing it will be better placed than those waiting for a first competition. That design work is happening now, which makes this a period for engagement upstream rather than bid preparation. If consolidation also raises award values and reduces their number, as single routes often do, firms living on a spread of small departmental contracts would need a partnering answer. Worth thinking through, and not yet worth planning around as though it were settled.

SpaceX now carries military traffic

What the department already buys shows why that matters. Figures released under a Freedom of Information request and reported by Reuters show the MOD has spent about £13 million on SpaceX Starshield terminals and airtime and about £16.5 million on Starlink, close to £30 million in total, and operates around 1,000 Starshield and 500 Starlink terminals. Starshield runs on the same constellation and ground infrastructure as Starlink, with dedicated terminals, separate gateways, enhanced encryption and military terms of service. The UK began using Starlink in 2022 and has since begun shifting operational military communications onto Starshield. These are cumulative disclosed figures rather than a contract value, and no procurement is announced with them.

Business Winning Angle: A thousand terminals in operational service is an installed base that has to be integrated, keyed, managed, monitored and planned around, including for degradation or withdrawal. That work is reachable by UK suppliers in a way the constellation is not: terminal management, cryptographic overlay, network assurance, and resilience and fallback planning. The proposition that lands is the sovereign layer around Starshield rather than an alternative to it, and satellite communications is exactly where the single buying approach begins.

Between 11:28 and 13:24 on 11 September the Defence Infrastructure Organisation published five pipeline notices, all study or advisory work on the MOD estate, all running 1 April 2027 to 31 March 2029, all under £1 million excluding VAT. Four distinct requirements, about £2.6 million between them: a Defence Investment Plan infrastructure plan at £750,000, published twice as 086372-2026 and an update at 086380-2026; the MOD Estate Lens at £960,000; an Establishment Management Plans application at £600,000; and £300,000 of client side support for the governance of net zero carbon surveys.

The most consequential is not the largest. The £750,000 study covers MOD space standards and options for private finance across the estate, feeding a recapitalisation plan that will guide investment and disinvestment for a decade, with planning running to around 2050. It is a UK1 pipeline notice, recorded as suitable for smaller firms, and a pipeline notice signals an intended route rather than a settled one.

Business Winning Angle: The estate arm of the Defence Investment Plan is being scoped by consultants on sub-£1 million contracts placed two years ahead, and whoever writes the space standards and private finance studies will shape the assumptions behind a decade of estate investment. That is influence a small firm can afford, open to advisers who would not bid the construction. A UK1 is advance information rather than an invitation, with no engagement process attached, so the value is lead time for positioning, teaming and framework mapping rather than a reason to email DIO. Five in two hours reads as one programme being packaged, which makes covering more than one requirement a stronger position than bidding a single study. And upstream advice on a recapitalisation plan raises a downstream conflict question, easier to settle now than later.