Payments without a reliable contract link
Generated analysis. Final responsibility remains with the authorised council reviewer — verify every evidence source before confirming. This signal describes a difference requiring explanation; it is not a finding of wrongdoing.
What was detected
£4,553,593,208 across 843,452 payments (100% of records) could not be linked to a published contract notice. This is a limitation of the published evidence rather than an indication of irregular spending.
- Confidence
- 90%
- Evidence completeness
- 90%
- Amount in scope
- £4,553,593,208
- Detected
- 2d ago
Alternative explanations
Shown before any conclusion is drawn. In published council spend, these are usually the correct explanation.
- UK councils are not required to publish a contract reference against each payment line, so most links must be inferred.
- Spend below the tender threshold has no notice to link to.
- Contracts awarded before the notice harvest window are not in scope of the acquired data.
Missing information
What would be needed to resolve this properly, and is not in the public record.
- Contract references in the council's own payment ledger.
- Historic notices predating the acquisition window.
Comparison method
Comparison group: Payments within this authority
Contract linking scored on identity, time, value, category and documents.
Source records
Contract-payment link table
analytics
Decision history
No decision has been recorded. This signal is in state New.
Provenance
- Ruleset
- UK-LOCAL-GOV-V1
- Model
- civ-sent-2026.1
- Dataset
- 20260720T153938Z
- Pipeline
- civicspend-pipeline-0.1.0
- Authority
- Leeds