FOI reference: FOI-2026-3403
You asked
I'm writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) to ask that you please disclose the following.
Total departmental spend with the following companies:
- Palantir Technologies
- Anduril
- X / Twitter
- Xai
- Oracle
- SpaceX
- Tesla
- Neuralink
I'd like this information to cover the longest timeframe possible, ideally for ten years, but 5 at a minimum.
Ideally, I'd like actual spend and predicted for contracts please, as I'm aware that, for example, the some contracts would not all necessarily be one payment, and also that not all contracts actually appear on Contracts Finder for a number of reasons, so I would be looking at historic spend, plus the rough predicted value of the contracts.
I do not need copies of the contracts, unless they are easily retrievable, or any further information than total departmental spend, dated over time year on year, as I believe this will be easier to achieve within the cost limit. The spend would include contracts, extensions, payments over initial values of contracts etc.
In terms of things like Twitter/X, this could include things like paid staff verified badges on the platform, for example.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Of the companies listed in the request, the Department has only made payments to Oracle and Twitter in the period 2017/18 to present date.
The department does not have any paid-for verified badges on X currently and has not done so since it was introduced on the platform, nor does it currently pay towards any subscriptions for X.
The included table lists the value of payments made to each supplier by financial year (April to March), covering the period 2016/17 to 2025/26. The payment values and dates are based on supplier invoice data, rather than when the expenditure was accounted.
Payments made to Twitter primarily relate to recruitment advertisements and development platform access for statistical purposes. Oracle payments are associated with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) cloud services, Exadata databases, related maintenance/support/licenses, and limited training costs.