The Procurement Act 2023: what changed for suppliers

The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025 and replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for most new procurements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland kept its own rules, so if you sell across the border you are working under two regimes. Contracts that started under the old regulations continue to run under them, which means you will see both frameworks of law referenced for years yet.

The Act is a reform of process, not a rewrite of what buyers want. The core skills of bidding have not changed. What has changed is where you register, how much you can see before a tender appears, how competitions are shaped, how awards are justified, and how misconduct is dealt with across the whole system. This guide is about what a supplier should do differently.

Register once on the central digital platform

The biggest day-to-day change is the central digital platform, delivered through an enhanced Find a Tender service. Instead of retyping your core details for every bid, you register your organisation once, store standard information (company details, an administrator, and supplier information you reuse across bids), and pull it through when you tender.

What to do:

• Register your organisation on Find a Tender and set up your first administrator. You only need to do this at the point you want to bid, but there is no reason to wait; do it before a deadline forces you to.
• Keep your stored supplier information current. Out-of-date turnover figures, insurance or a lapsed administrator account cause the same missed deadlines they always did.
• You will still be sent to buyers' own e-procurement portals to download documents and submit bids. The central platform holds your reusable details and publishes notices; it does not replace every buyer portal.

Buyers now publish more, and earlier

The Act pushes far more information into the open, and much of it lands before a tender goes live. For a supplier who does the reading, this is free market research.

• Pipeline notices. A contracting authority that expects to spend more than £100m under its contracts in a financial year must publish a pipeline notice, listing procurements it plans worth more than £2m over the next 18 months. Published within 56 days of the start of the financial year, these tell you what is coming at your larger buyers before any tender exists.
• Preliminary market engagement notices. Buyers are encouraged to engage the market before they procure, and where they do they should publish a notice about it. Treat these as an invitation: early engagement is your chance to shape a specification so it fits what you actually do, rather than reacting to one written without you.
• A single lifecycle on one platform. Planned procurements, tender notices, award notices and contract details now flow through the central platform in a consistent sequence, so you can track a requirement from pipeline to award and see who won, at what value.

The practical move is to set up alerts against pipeline and market-engagement notices, not just live tenders. The suppliers who win the big competitions are usually the ones who saw them coming a year out.

Competitions look different: the competitive flexible procedure

The old menu of set procedures (open, restricted, competitive dialogue, competitive procedure with negotiation, innovation partnership) is gone. The Act leaves two competitive routes: the open procedure, a single-stage tender much as before, and the competitive flexible procedure, which lets buyers design a process to suit the contract.

That flexibility is the change to plan for. Under the competitive flexible procedure a buyer can run multiple stages, shortlist, hold dialogue or negotiation, and take refined bids, in whatever shape they choose, provided it is proportionate and set out up front. For suppliers this means:

• Read the procurement-specific tender notice and associated documents carefully every time. There is no longer a standard shape to assume. The rules of each competition are defined by the buyer, so the process, stages and timings vary from one tender to the next.
• Expect more dialogue on complex contracts, and resource for it. A multi-stage flexible procedure asks more of your bid team across a longer period than a single-stage open tender.
• Award criteria and how they are assessed must be published. You are entitled to know how you will be scored before you bid; use it.

Award on the most advantageous tender, not the lowest price

Under the old regulations buyers awarded to the "most economically advantageous tender" (MEAT). The Act replaces this with the Most Advantageous Tender (MAT). Dropping the word "economically" is deliberate: it signals that buyers can weigh quality, social value and wider benefit alongside price, rather than defaulting to lowest cost.

In practice this reinforces a direction already well underway. Price still matters, but a strong quality and social value response can win a contract that a cheaper bid loses. Read the award criteria, see where the marks sit, and invest your effort where the points are. If quality carries sixty per cent of the score, a polished price on a thin method statement is a losing bid.

Two related transparency duties help you improve. Buyers must publish their award criteria, and unsuccessful bidders receive an assessment summary explaining how their bid scored against them. Treat every assessment summary as paid-for feedback: it tells you, in the buyer's own words, what a winning bid looked like.

Exclusions and the debarment list

The Act tightened and centralised how poorly behaving suppliers are kept out. There are mandatory exclusion grounds (Schedule 6), which a buyer must act on, and discretionary grounds (Schedule 7), which a buyer may act on. Mandatory grounds cover serious matters such as certain convictions and cartel conduct; discretionary grounds are broader and include insolvency, professional misconduct, breach of contract and poor performance.

The new element is a central debarment list, operated by the Debarment Review Service and published on gov.uk. A supplier placed on it for a mandatory ground must be excluded from procurements across the board; a supplier listed for a discretionary ground may be excluded. Exclusion can extend to a supplier's connected persons and key subcontractors.

What this means for you:

• Know your own position on both schedules before you bid, including anything affecting directors, parent companies or subcontractors you rely on. You may be asked to declare and, where relevant, to show "self-cleaning" evidence that the problem has been fixed.
• Poor performance now travels. Failure to deliver, and published contract-performance information, can follow you into future competitions in a way that was harder to trace before. Delivering well on the contracts you win is part of winning the next one.

Transparency continues after you win

Under the old regime, published scrutiny largely stopped at award. The Act extends it into delivery, which changes how you are watched as an incumbent.

• KPIs on larger contracts. For a public contract worth more than £5m, the buyer must set at least three key performance indicators, and your performance against them is assessed and published at least annually. Assume your delivery is on the public record.
• Contract-performance and payments transparency. Buyers publish information when suppliers perform badly or breach a contract, and payment performance is more visible through the supply chain. Thirty-day payment terms are implied into public contracts and flow down to subcontractors, which helps if you are the one waiting to be paid.
• A standstill period still applies. Where one is required, there is a mandatory standstill of at least eight working days after the contract award notice is published, before the contract is signed. That window is your opportunity to raise a concern or seek an assessment summary.

What to do differently, in short

The Procurement Act 2023 did not change the fundamentals of writing a good bid, but it did change the terrain around it. Register once on the central digital platform and keep your details clean. Watch pipeline and market-engagement notices, not just live tenders, so you see work coming. Read each competition on its own terms, because the process is now designed contract by contract. Put your effort where the MAT criteria award the marks. Keep your own house in order against the exclusion grounds, and deliver well, because performance is published and follows you. The buyers most rewarded by the new rules are the transparent, well-prepared ones; the same is true of suppliers.