The contract that grew four times in silence
In this sample case study, a service contract quadrupled through variations that never required a new tender.
Sample content. This is a demonstration article. The events, organisations and quotations are fictional and are published only to evaluate layout and editorial format.
This is demo content. The figures below are invented for layout evaluation.
The original award was modest enough to attract no coverage at all. Four variations later, it is the largest single line in the department's operating budget.
Why this pattern repeats
Variations are cheap to authorise and expensive to reverse. They are also, crucially, reported in a different place from the original award — which means the running total exists in no single public document.
Sources
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