The problem
When a company holding public contracts fails, the consequences land on whoever depended on it. The failure of a major government contractor in 2018 remains the defining example, and the lesson drawn afterwards was that nobody had a consolidated view of exposure.
The raw material to build that view is free and better than expected. The official insolvency record publishes a JSON interface with no key required, carrying over three million notices. Critically, each notice carries a structured company number — a direct identifier join, with no name matching required.
On the other side sit the public procurement record, the care provider registers, the school trust register and the social housing register — millions of contractual and regulatory relationships between the state and companies.
Nobody joins them. So the question "which public contracts and regulated services are currently held by companies in insolvency proceedings" has no answer, despite both halves being free and one of them carrying a clean identifier.
And the standard alternative does not work. Predicting failure from filed accounts requires profit and loss data that small companies do not publish — a requirement that was paused in January 2026 and pushed to 2028, with an opt-out from publication attached. Roughly two-thirds of the standard model’s power is unavailable, and published testing shows such models flagging around a quarter of all companies, of which the overwhelming majority never fail.
The system
Watchman abandons prediction and does something more useful: it watches events, and it knows who depends on whom.
It ingests insolvency notices continuously, resolves each to an organisation through the entity spine, and checks that organisation against every public relationship the platform knows about — contracts, care registrations, school trusts, social housing, land holdings.
The output is an exposure alert rather than a risk score. Not "this company might fail" but "this company has entered administration, and here are the seventeen contracts and four hundred care beds that depend on it."
It layers earlier signals underneath — charge filings, strike-off action, overdue accounts — all observable for every company regardless of size, and all events rather than inferences.
And it inverts for planning: for any council or department, which of its suppliers show distress signals, and what would be lost if each failed.
Worked examples
Two situations this system answers
A supplier enters administration on a Friday afternoon. Which departments, councils and services depend on it? Nobody can say before Monday, and possibly not for weeks.
Watchman reads the notice. Where it carries a company number — every liquidator appointment does — the public bodies relying on that company are listed immediately, with no guessing about which company it is. Where the number is missing, the registered address in the notice still places it.
A small supplier files accounts late two years running and takes on new charges over its assets. Both are published signals of difficulty. Nobody is watching, because the standard financial models need profit data small companies never file.
Watchman treats those as facts that have happened rather than a prediction, and warns the buyers who depend on that supplier.
Data foundation
Every dataset below is open, or its access constraint is stated
| Dataset | Publisher | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| Insolvency notices | The Gazette | Free JSON interface, no key, over three million notices, each with a structured company number and a direct link to the company record. |
| Companies House bulk and streams | Companies House | Company data, charges, insolvency and control. Free bulk downloads plus resumable event streams. |
| Procurement record | Cabinet Office | Contract awards and performance across the public sector. |
| Care provider registers | CQC and Ofsted | Regulated services and their operators. |
| Academy trust membership | DfE | Company numbers on every open trust. |
| Registered providers | Regulator of Social Housing | Social housing providers, with a corporate form field routing each to the right identifier authority. |
| Local authority spending | Councils | Payments to suppliers, once normalised and resolved. |
Capabilities
Benefits
For government
- Gives the public sector the consolidated supplier exposure view whose absence was the lesson of the 2018 contractor collapse.
- Works for small suppliers, where accounts-based models cannot, because it uses events rather than ratios.
- Supports the care market oversight duties that now sit in statute, from the supplier side.
- Lets buyers act before a failure rather than discovering exposure afterwards.
For the public
- Services less likely to stop abruptly when a provider fails.
- Public money less likely to be committed to organisations already in difficulty.
- Transparency over which public services depend on which private companies.
Delivery
Phasing
Risks & mitigations
The base rate is roughly one in two hundred companies a year. Any model flagging a meaningful share will be wrong the overwhelming majority of the time. Watchman reports events that have happened and dependencies that exist, not probabilities of future failure.
Publishing that a company shows distress signals could itself precipitate difficulty. Exposure analysis stays in a restricted tier for public bodies; only aggregate concentration is published.
Several provider registers carry no company number, and under half of social housing providers are Companies House entities at all. Coverage is reported per register rather than assumed uniform.
Sources
All sources checked in August 2026. Figures carry the reference period of their source, which may differ from publication date. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary source it is not used.