Public sector bodies spent almost £17bn with private equity-backed firms owned offshore in the 2024-25 financial year, according to analysis by the GMB union and procurement data company Tussell, published as the union presses Labour’s conference this week for new procurement laws.

The figures show that contracts worth £16.95bn went to private equity-backed firms whose global ultimate owner was based offshore.

Across all private equity-backed suppliers, public sector contracts totalled more than £31bn in the same year, the GMB said. Offshore-owned firms therefore accounted for more than half of that total.

The GMB has moved a motion at the conference calling for the government to “maximise UK content and supply-chain opportunities in publicly funded energy, defence, housing and infrastructure projects”.

Gary Smith, the union’s general secretary, will tell delegates: “Labour was elected on a promise to fix a broken Britain. To make, buy and sell more at home.

“But, things are still broken.”

Smith will point to what he calls a broken industrial policy that is “leaving 500 million bricks sitting in factories during a housing crisis”, and an energy policy that he says “bans us from using more of our gas to survive a global fuel crisis”.

“And our broken procurement policy has let billions of public money go to companies owned offshore,” he will say.

“Conference, this is simply not good enough. A Labour Government – this Labour Government – must do better.

“We need new legislation on Procurement so that when public money is spent it guarantees better jobs and better opportunities here at home.”

The GMB figures follow separate Tussell data published by the Guardian in June. That analysis found that almost £24.4bn of direct spending with government suppliers went to companies controlled by a private equity firm in the year to April 2025, equivalent to 8.8 per cent of government procurement spend that year.

According to Tussell, local government spent £9.8bn directly with private equity-controlled suppliers, or 10 per cent of its procurement spend, while more than £5bn of direct NHS procurement spend, 10.7 per cent of the total, went to such firms.

The June analysis measured direct spending with firms controlled by private equity. The GMB figures cover contracts with private equity-backed firms and break out those with an offshore owner.

The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025. According to the Cabinet Office, it governs the £385bn spent through public procurement every year.

In a consultation on further reforms to public procurement opened in June last year, the Cabinet Office proposed requiring public bodies to carry out a public interest test before outsourcing service contracts worth more than £5m, to judge whether the work could be done more effectively in-house.

It also proposed a minimum 10 per cent weighting for social value award criteria on major procurements, and said it was considering powers for ministers to designate goods, works and services as critical to economic security. The government said it intended to legislate to amend the Act when parliamentary time allows.

In March, the government set departmental targets to direct £7.4bn a year to small businesses by 2028, the first time individual departments have been required to set goals for their spending with SMEs.

Procurement has featured elsewhere at the conference. Responding to the speech by John Healey, the chancellor, Shevaun Haviland, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said his pledge to use public procurement to back British capability showed he understood its importance in driving regional growth.

Haviland added that smaller firms “must be able to compete for contracts on a level playing field”.

Calls for more domestic content in defence contracts predate the GMB motion. Last year Make UK Defence, which represents more than 600 UK defence manufacturers, called for foreign firms winning Ministry of Defence contracts to be required to reinvest 75 per cent to 90 per cent of the economic value of those contracts in the UK over 10 years.

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