A price, a budget and a payment are different facts.
The Counter Disinformation Data Project’s Oliver Wyman evaluation commission disclosed a £656,000 price excluding VAT, evaluation criteria and a Treasury-linked feasibility gate. The £8.4 million programme allocation was a separate budget figure. Adding these together as separate expenditure would double-count parts of the same programme.
The acquired documents establish commissioning and conditions. They do not establish cash paid, the final evaluation or whether the funding gate was exercised.
Advisers, suppliers and evaluators play different roles.
The Online Safety Data Initiative involved a CDEI-convened advisory group, suppliers including Faculty and PUBLIC, and PA Consulting programme evaluation. PUBLIC described a prototype sandbox for assessing classifiers. Its later work explicitly credited reuse of OSDI practices.
These records connect people, programmes and methods. They do not establish that a prototype became a production system or identify every redacted subcontractor.
Read the original sources 7
Find the decision after the deliverable.
The most revealing next document would be an acceptance decision paired with the actual evaluation: what was tested, what failed, what changed and whether funding or deployment followed. A commissioned report and an effective government capability are different outcomes.