Bounded review, 9 September 2026. PUBLIC/CDDP only; OSDI governance and its separate consortium remain in the root lane. No new procurement award or PUBLIC-specific CDDP payment was established. Acquisition stops here for the forest review.
Finding
PUBLIC itself says it helped deliver three Shared Outcomes Fund projects, including the Counter-Disinformation Data Platform. That supports an attributed claim of participation. It does not specify what PUBLIC delivered for CDDP, whether it held a direct commission or a subcontract, the relevant legal entity, a fee, a work period or an accepted deliverable. The original CDDP procurement link now redirects to the marketplace homepage. The retained official contract, however, exposes a precise missing record: the buyer's approved key-subcontractor identities in the project-management call-off are redacted. That is a credible location where PUBLIC's role might be resolved, without identifying PUBLIC as an obscured entry.
The current PUBLIC website identifies its controller as PUBLIC Group International Ltd; the Companies House register supplies the exact legal name PUBLIC GROUP INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, number 10608507. This establishes a current brand/entity association. It does not prove that this company was the party performing the historical CDDP work.
What the records actually establish
| Record and exact scope | Supported result | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| [PUBLIC, Better collaboration, bigger impact](http[local research file] substantive article body from its first digital-transformation paragraph through its proposed roundtable; author Mahlet Yared | PUBLIC describes participation in three Shared Outcomes Fund projects over the preceding 24 months, working with more than eight government departments in aggregate. Its CDDP paragraph identifies DCMS as lead and says delivery involved seven departments. The stated purpose is improved cross-government sharing and analysis of disinformation data. | No article publication date appears in the read page or retained date metadata. The current footer's 2025 copyright date and the relative 24-month period cannot supply a historical start/end date. The proposed roundtable is an announcement, without observed delivery or attendance. The aggregate departmental count is not PUBLIC's CDDP-specific customer count. |
| [PUBLIC privacy policy](http[local research file] heading “As of January 2026” and “Identity and contact details of the data controller” | PUBLIC Group International Ltd, at 1 Horse Guards Avenue, is the named controller for the site. | A website-controller notice is not a CDDP contract or historical commissioning record. |
| [Companies House company 10608507](http[local research file] overview identity, status, type and incorporation fields | PUBLIC GROUP INTERNATIONAL LIMITED, active private limited company, incorporated 8 February 2017; registered office at PUBLIC Hall, 1 Horse Guards Avenue. | No CDDP activity, payment or subcontract appears in these overview fields. No inference from directors, ownership or other clients was used. |
| [Full Fact Report 2022](http[local research file] Chapter 3 paragraph listing CDDP and footnotes 36–38, especially footnote 38 | Full Fact identifies an original DCMS procurement titled Counter Disinformation Data Platform Digital / Technical Project Management Team, dated 26 August 2021, with opportunity 15487. It distinguishes CDDP from the OSDI entry and its consortium in the preceding paragraph. | This is primary evidence of Full Fact's citation, secondary evidence about an original notice that is no longer readable at that route. It does not cite PUBLIC's delivery article or establish an article date. |
| [Disclosed CDDP bundle](http[local research file] PDF 114–120 / order-form printed 2–8, call-off 102548 | DCMS is buyer and Faculty Science Limited, 08873131, is supplier for the Digital/Technical Project Management Team. PDF 115 dates the order form10 January 2022; PDF 116 states call-off start24 November 2021, expiry31 March 2023. The service encompasses discovery, development and delivery of a prototype. The read schedule includes project/product management, business analysis, service design, data science, legal/security and disinformation advisory roles, plus reports and sprint governance. | Scope breadth makes a specialist contribution possible; it does not assign any role to PUBLIC. The initial phase dates and funding-gated later phase must not be flattened into proof that every listed service was performed. Execution, acceptance and PUBLIC-specific work were not established in this lane. |
| Same bundle, PDF 120 / printed 8, “Key Subcontractor(s)” | The form says entry into it provides buyer written approval for the listed key subcontractors. The identifying entries immediately below are blacked out. This was visually checked in the original, rather than inferred from blank extracted text. | Do not identify an obscured entry as PUBLIC, count the black bars as a proven count of entities, or call them empty fields. |
| Same bundle, PDF 180–181 and186, distinct call-off 102887 | This is the CDDP Technical Build Team G-Cloud 12 order, effective11 April 2022, with Faculty Science Ltd as supplier. Its supplier-information field states the subcontractors/partners list is “Not Applicable”. | This is contract-specific. It neither resolves the redacted 102548 subcontractor list nor excludes a separate commission, earlier role or later variation involving PUBLIC. |
The official [FOI release's document inventory](http[local research file] lists the disclosed Faculty, NewsWhip and Oliver Wyman instruments, while withholding the Discovery Report and Product Operating Model. It is not evidence that PUBLIC never worked on the project. The release page itself has inconsistent displayed chronology: published 28 June 2024, request 25 August 2023, response 25 September 2024. Those labels are preserved rather than silently reconciled. This lane relies on the retained contract text for its dates, not a reconstructed release date.
Rival explanations and what must not be merged
A PUBLIC contribution as one of the project-management supplier's specialists or approved subcontractors is compatible with both the supplier's claim and the redacted subcontract field. A separate consultancy commission or contribution at another phase is also compatible. A broad marketing description that compresses a narrower contribution remains possible. No obtained record discriminates between these explanations.
The OSDI Faculty/PUBLIC consortium is evidence about OSDI. It cannot supply the missing CDDP contractual edge. Similarly, the 2022 G-Cloud build order's subcontract field cannot override the distinct project-management order's redacted list. The combined record supports a PUBLIC claim of CDDP involvement alongside an independently documented Faculty commission; it does not yet support a named PUBLIC subcontract, direct DCMS award, CDDP fee, software ownership or government acceptance of PUBLIC work.
Candidate directional relations
| From → to | Type / stage | Scope and confidence |
|---|---|---|
| PUBLIC brand → CDDP | reports participation in delivery / supplier self-report | Directly read claim; historical period undated and exact contribution unresolved. |
| PUBLIC website → PUBLIC GROUP INTERNATIONAL LIMITED 10608507 | identifies current website controller / website-controller disclosure plus register identity | Strong current association; no backdated CDDP contract identity. |
| DCMS → Faculty Science Limited 08873131 | commissions through disclosed call-off 102548 / contractual instrument | Digital/Technical Project Management Team; order-form date10 January 2022 and stated start24 November 2021. Separate from performance or acceptance. |
| DCMS → undisclosed key subcontractor identities | provides approval through102548 order form / redacted identification | Mechanism observed at PDF 120, identities unreadable; keep this as a record-gap relation, not a PUBLIC edge. |
| DCMS → Faculty Science Ltd | commissions through separate call-off 102887 / contractual instrument | Technical Build Team effective11 April 2022; no listed subcontractor/partner in the inspected form. |
Custody, access and reading extent
The supplier article's original HTML is retained as public-claim.html (58,137 bytes; SHA256 1edec8751a3944880d52ffc927caad6e160d73f706313906be556dbe15fb4e36) with a derived plain-text copy. Status: read. Read scope is the substantive article, author and relevant footer links, not the unrelated recommended articles.
The original opportunity 15487 reader returned a non-retryable safe-opening error. One ordinary GET substitute returned HTTP 200 after redirecting to http[local research file]. Retained public-procurement-15487.html is therefore a generic homepage capture, not a successful procurement capture (22,990 bytes; SHA256 adb1e4071e457420c1e5abb82c830e0ebaea4890a88bc8779303f581b215caa1). Requested-record status: inaccessible by this route; returned page inspected and excluded as substantive procurement evidence. No retry or alternate host was attempted after that substitute.
The Companies House overview, PUBLIC privacy identity section, Full Fact Chapter 3/footnotes and official FOI inventory were read through the public web reader. Their original response bytes were not retained in this lane. No hashes are claimed for those web-reader-only scopes.
The existing 262-page CDDP bundle was reused, not downloaded again: ../supplier-platform-wave-2026-09-09/cddp-foi-bundle.pdf, SHA256 71bd6a522a765d53f9aa79b239134226be64891ea3c67711abc9d788fb87748f. New directly read contract scope: PDF 114–122,180–181,186, with PDF 120 visually inspected. The extract is retained as public-contract-extract.txt; the PDF 120 render as public-page-120.png. Targeted name searches across extracted text found no PUBLIC legal-name variant. This search is a discovery aid, not a full reading of every page and not evidence of absence; redactions and possible names outside the searched variants matter. The unrelated retained public-gcloud-sandbox.pdf was checked only by first page and targeted CDDP/name search; it was not used to support a CDDP relation.
Precise reopening condition
The discriminating records are the unredacted key-subcontractor entries or buyer approval record for call-off 102548, and the relevant signed PUBLIC statement of work/subcontract, role allocation or accepted deliverable. Likely custodians are DSIT as successor department, Faculty as prime contractor, and the PUBLIC entity that performed the work. These records were not requested from anyone. A genuinely accessible official award/commission record naming PUBLIC or a public delivery artifact explicitly allocating CDDP work to it would also reopen the question. Further general PUBLIC profiles or the separate OSDI consortium would not resolve it.