The Procurement Act 2023: what actually changed for suppliers

The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025, replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for most new procurements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland retained its own regime. If you bid for public work, four things changed in ways you will actually notice.

1. There are more notices, earlier

The Act introduced a wider set of notices covering the full contract lifecycle. The ones worth watching:

• Pipeline notices — contracting authorities expecting to spend over £100m in a financial year must publish what they intend to procure in the next 18 months. This is advance warning, published before anything is tendered.
• Preliminary market engagement notices — published when a buyer wants to talk to the market before writing a specification. Responding is how you influence a specification instead of merely reacting to it.
• Contract change notices — published when a live contract is modified, which tells you when an incumbent is struggling or a scope is growing.
• Contract performance notices — published where a supplier breaches or underperforms against KPIs on larger contracts.

The practical shift: the useful information now arrives well before the tender. Suppliers who only watch live tender notices are reading the last chapter.

2. The procedures were simplified

The old menu — open, restricted, competitive dialogue, competitive procedure with negotiation — was replaced with two routes:

• Open procedure — a single-stage competition, as before.
• Competitive flexible procedure — a route buyers design themselves, with whatever stages, negotiation and dialogue they judge appropriate.

For suppliers this means less predictability. You can no longer assume the shape of a competition from its label; you have to read the procurement documents to find out how many stages there are, whether negotiation happens and when. Read the timetable properly before committing bid resource.

3. Award criteria changed from MEAT to MAT

Contracts are now awarded to the Most Advantageous Tender rather than the Most Economically Advantageous Tender. Dropping “economically” was deliberate: it signals that buyers may weight quality, social value and delivery confidence more heavily against price without needing to justify departing from a cost focus.

In practice, price still matters enormously. But the change gives buyers cover to award on quality, and the better-run authorities have used it.

4. There is now a central debarment list

The Cabinet Office maintains a public debarment list of suppliers excluded from public procurement, on either mandatory grounds (serious offences) or discretionary grounds (poor performance, professional misconduct). Exclusion can apply across the whole public sector rather than contract by contract.

Two implications. Check your supply chain — using a debarred subcontractor is your problem. And take contract performance seriously, because underperformance is now a matter of public record with consequences beyond the contract itself.

What did not change

More than the coverage suggested. Thresholds work broadly as before. CPV codes remain the classification standard. Frameworks and dynamic markets still dominate how work is actually awarded. Social value remains a scored requirement. And Scotland continues under its own rules, so a UK-wide supplier is still working with two regimes.

What to do about it

1. Watch pipeline notices for your major buyers. Knowing a programme is coming 12 months out is worth more than any tender-writing improvement.
2. Respond to preliminary market engagement. It is unglamorous, unpaid, and the single most reliable way to shape a specification you can win against.
3. Read each procurement's timetable individually. The competitive flexible procedure means no two competitions are guaranteed to look alike.
4. Keep your performance record clean. It is now visible in ways it never used to be.

The transparency regime is the real change here. Far more information about who is buying, what they are paying and how incumbents are performing is now public — and most suppliers are not using it.