The Procurement Act 2023: what actually changed for suppliers

On 24 February 2025 the United Kingdom stopped running public procurement under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and started running it under the Procurement Act 2023. The Act had received Royal Assent sixteen months earlier, in October 2023, and its start date was pushed back once — from October 2024 — so that a new National Procurement Policy Statement could be published first.

Most explanations of the Act are written for lawyers and buyers. This one is written for the supplier trying to work out what to do differently on Monday morning.

First, the boundary nobody mentions

The Act covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland kept its own regime.

This matters more than it sounds. If you are bidding for work with a Scottish contracting authority, most of what follows does not apply to you, and the portal you need is Public Contracts Scotland rather than Find a Tender. Suppliers who assume "UK procurement" means one set of rules discover the difference at the worst possible moment.

You register once now, not once per bid

The single biggest practical change is the Central Digital Platform.

Under the old regime, every authority asked the same questions in its own format — company details, accounts, insurance certificates, policies, past performance — and you retyped them for every bid. The new platform holds that core supplier information once. Authorities draw on it, and you keep it current rather than reassembling it.

If you sell to the UK public sector and have not registered on the Central Digital Platform, that is the first thing to do, before any particular opportunity appears. Bidders who register in a hurry, mid-deadline, are the ones whose submissions are incomplete.

"Most Advantageous Tender" is not a rebrand

Contracts used to be awarded to the Most Economically Advantageous Tender. They are now awarded to the Most Advantageous Tender — the word "economically" was deliberately removed.

Read that as permission, formally granted, for authorities to weight things other than price. It does not oblige anyone to stop caring about cost, and plenty of buyers still score price heavily. But when an evaluation model puts serious weight on social value, delivery quality or environmental factors, that model now sits squarely inside the rules rather than at their edge.

The practical consequence for a bidder is that a lowest-price strategy is weaker than it used to be, and a submission that treats the non-price criteria as box-ticking will lose to one that treats them as scored questions. Which they are.

The procedures changed shape

Two named procedures — restricted, and competitive with negotiation — are gone. In their place:

• Open procedure, essentially unchanged: one stage, anyone may bid.
• Competitive flexible procedure, which is new and genuinely different. The authority designs its own process — how many stages, whether it negotiates, whether it demonstrates, whether it prototypes.

The flexible procedure is the one to pay attention to, because it means you can no longer predict the shape of a competition from its name. Two contracts of similar size may run entirely differently. Read the procurement documents for the process itself, not just the specification. Assuming a familiar structure is now a real way to be caught out.

Frameworks and dynamic markets

Open frameworks can be reopened to new suppliers during their life. Under the old rules, missing a framework's original competition shut you out for its full term — a closed door for years. Now there is a route in.

Dynamic markets replace dynamic purchasing systems and go further: suppliers may apply to join at any time, across a broader range of procurement.

If a framework or dynamic market previously excluded you, it is worth checking its status again rather than assuming the position is unchanged.

Transparency cuts both ways

The Act requires substantially more publication across the life of a contract — planning, award, performance, amendment, termination. Some of this is aimed at suppliers, and some of it is unusually useful to them.

• Pipeline notices. Authorities above a significant annual spend threshold must publish what they intend to buy over the coming 18 months. This is a business development asset, and almost nobody reads it. Knowing a requirement is coming eight months out is worth more than any bid-writing technique.
• Published KPIs. Contracts above a set value must carry at least three published key performance indicators, with performance reported annually. You can therefore see how an incumbent is actually performing before you bid against them.
• Assessment summaries. Unsuccessful bidders receive an explanation of how their bid scored against the criteria. Read these properly. Three assessment summaries from the same authority will teach you more about how it evaluates than any amount of guidance.
• A central debarment list. Excluded suppliers are named on a single public register, rather than each authority reaching its own view privately.

Getting paid

The Act implies 30-day payment terms into public contracts, and those terms are intended to flow down the supply chain rather than stopping at the prime contractor.

If you are a subcontractor to a public contract, this is the clause worth knowing. It does not collect the money for you, but it changes the conversation from a favour you are asking to a term you are owed.

What to actually do

If you sell to the UK public sector, in this order:

1. Register on the Central Digital Platform now, not when a deadline is close.
2. Set up alerts on Find a Tender for your categories, and read the pipeline notices of the three or four authorities that matter most to you.
3. Re-check any framework or dynamic market that shut you out before February 2025. The door may be open.
4. Read the procedure, not just the specification. Under the flexible procedure the process is designed per contract.
5. Request and read your assessment summaries every time you lose. This is the cheapest competitive intelligence available to you.

Where to read the primary sources

• The Procurement Act 2023 itself, on legislation.gov.uk
• The Procurement Regulations 2024, which carry much of the detail
• Cabinet Office guidance on the Act, published as a series of documents
• The National Procurement Policy Statement, which sets the priorities authorities are told to pursue

We cite these rather than summarising them because procurement rules change and guidance is reissued. If a figure in this article matters to a decision you are taking, check it against the source above — and if you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.