Whose ethics are they anyway?

Procurement decisions rarely make national headlines, but the Mayor of London’s intervention to pause the Metropolitan Police’s contract with Palantir did. Alongside the expected references to process and security, the coverage repeatedly used a third term – ethics.

Ethical concern is not currently a recognised ground for blocking a contract award under UK procurement law. Neither the Procurement Act 2023, the Procurement Regulations 2024, nor the accompanying government guidance defines ethics or sets out how it might be used to justify a decision. So, it is worth asking how a term with no clear legal basis found its way into the public explanation for the pause of one of the country’s more closely watched technology contracts.

Procedural reasons 

The formal grounds for the Mayor’s intervention were procedural – documents that had not been signed off, and steps in the approval process that had not been properly completed. Gaps of this kind are not unusual in public procurement, and most go unnoticed.

What makes this case more interesting is why a procedural gap of this kind became grounds for such a public intervention. Palantir is a well-known presence in defence technology and artificial intelligence, and its involvement in a project as sensitive as Met Police data infrastructure was always likely to draw scrutiny.

It is reasonable to wonder whether the underlying story is less about missing paperwork and more about a difference in outlook between the Mayor’s Office and a supplier whose approach to defence and AI is at odds with the Mayor’s Office’s priorities. The process issue gave the Mayor a legitimate route to act. The reasoning behind the decision may have had rather more to do with values than with compliance.

That tension has since sharpened. Palantir’s lawyers have signalled a legal challenge to the blocked £50m contract, arguing that MOPAC’s reference to concerns about the firm’s “values and ethics” cannot lawfully justify a procurement refusal — a challenge still unresolved. Notably, MOPAC has since granted the Met a separate 12-month extension to a smaller Palantir pilot while requiring a fully open procurement process for any long-term provider — a distinction that looks very like an attempt to keep capability running without repeating the same legal exposure.

Ethical standards

None of this means ethics is unfamiliar territory for procurement. Our professional body, CIPS, has spent decades embedding ethical standards in the profession’s identity, informed by its global reach and by the corruption and poor practice its members encounter in many developing economies. That commitment was recently reasserted by CIPS CEO Ben Farrell in a talk I attended at Procurex 2026, where the message was that ethical practice sits alongside commercial skill as one of the foundations on which the profession is built.

The relationship between that professional tradition and government runs deeper than it might first appear. Around nine years ago, Malcolm Harrison left his post as CEO of the Crown Commercial Service, now the Government Commercial Authority, to become CEO of CIPS. That move is a reminder that the boundary between public procurement policy and professional ethical standards has always been fairly fluid, with expertise moving in both directions over the years.

So, the profession already has a considered, well-established language for ethics. UK procurement law has simply not adopted it yet, and that mismatch is where a more practical risk begins to emerge.

Political convictions

If ethics has no legal definition, then each time it is invoked to justify a contract decision, someone is filling that gap with their own interpretation. In this case, that interpretation appears to sit with the Mayor’s Office. On a different contract, under a different administration, it could just as easily reflect a different set of political convictions.

That is worth considering carefully. Public procurement exists to award contracts against defined criteria intended to serve the public and deliver value for the taxpayer. If ethics remains an undefined term available to whichever administration is in office, there is a real risk that it becomes a way of favouring suppliers who share the governing party’s political outlook, rather than a genuine safeguard. That would sit uneasily with the fairness and objectivity that procurement law is designed to protect.

If ethics remains an undefined term available to whichever administration is in office, there is a real risk that it becomes a way of favouring suppliers who share the governing party’s political outlook.

Workable definition

None of this is an argument against ethics having a role in procurement decisions. CIPS has shown for decades that ethical practice and commercial rigour work well together, and often reinforce one another. The argument is simply that ethics should not enter procurement law informally and without definition, left to whoever happens to be making the decision at the time.

If ethics is to feature in future legislation or formal guidance, it deserves a proper foundation – a definition developed with input from academia, industry and the public, rather than set by political office alone. Criteria that can be applied consistently regardless of which party is in government, and grounded in evidence rather than sentiment, would serve the profession and the public far better than the current, undefined use of the term.

The Palantir contract may be remembered as a one-off. The more useful takeaway is what it reveals – a gap between the language decision-makers are already reaching for and the legal framework meant to support them. Addressing that gap now, while the definition is still open to thoughtful shaping, seems a more constructive path than waiting until the next contract to raise the same question.

Ben Pollock is a Commercial Consultant at 4C Associates