The Procurement Act 2023 came into force in February 2025 with the most significant overhaul of UK public sector buying rules in a generation. A year on, the dust has settled enough to see what genuinely changed for suppliers, what was hype, and what to do next.
The Central Digital Platform actually works
The biggest practical change for suppliers is the Central Digital Platform (CDP) on Find a Tender Service. You register your business once, providing financial information, accreditations, insurances, and parent company details, and that record is reused across procurements run under the Act, whichever e-tendering portal the buyer uses. No more uploading the same Selection Questionnaire evidence and Companies House extract to fourteen different tenders.
The CDP is not optional: it applies to any contracting authority running a procurement under the Act, not only central government, so councils, NHS trusts, housing associations and universities use it too. Procurements that started under the old regulations before 24 February 2025 run to completion under the old rules, so you will still see both for a while.
The new notice types are creating findable opportunities
The Act introduced a stack of new notice types: Planned Procurement Notices (PPNs) flagging upcoming tenders months in advance, Preliminary Market Engagement Notices for market soundings, and Contract Change Notices for variations to existing contracts. For suppliers, these are gold dust.
A Planned Procurement Notice tells you a buyer is going to tender something in (typically) three to twelve months. That window is enough time to build a relationship with the buyer, attend their pre-procurement briefing, and position your bid before formal evaluation begins. Most suppliers still ignore them entirely, which means the ones who pay attention have an outsized advantage.
Direct award rules are tighter than before
Pre-Act, direct awards under various exemptions were common, particularly emergency procurement after COVID. The new rules narrow when a buyer can skip competition: only where one of the Act's direct award justifications applies, such as urgency, where only one supplier can deliver, or certain repeat and additional purchases, and the buyer must publish a transparency notice first. Most buyers we speak to are now defaulting to a competitive process even where they could direct-award, simply to avoid the documentation burden of justifying an exemption.
The net effect: more opportunities go to the open market. Good news if you are an SME challenger; less good if you are the incumbent on a major framework. The Cabinet Office's published guidance also makes it explicit that buyers should consider SMEs in pre-market engagement, which is creating space for smaller suppliers to be heard during specification design rather than only at the bidding stage.
Social value weightings have stabilised
Social value weightings vary by buyer, but in-scope central government buyers must give social value at least 10% of the total score, and some buyers go higher on community-impact contracts (housing, social care, regeneration). The Social Value Model, now applied through PPN 002 (which replaced PPN 06/20 from 24 February 2025), is widely used as the template.
Social value questions now appear in most public sector tenders. Buyers select the social value outcomes most relevant to the contract, and expect specific, measurable commitments. The era of generic social value waffle is over.
What has not changed
Bidding still takes a long time. Selection Questionnaires are still onerous. Buyers still publish vague specifications. Feedback after award is still unreliable. The Act improved process and transparency; it did not magically reduce the work of writing good bids. Anyone who told you otherwise was selling something.
Standstill periods remain a real bottleneck. The Act sets a mandatory standstill of eight working days between the contract award notice and contract signature, and assessment summaries now give every supplier that submitted an assessed tender a clear explanation of its scores, which it can act on within that window.
Three moves to make in 2026
- Complete your CDP supplier profile properly. Even if you have not bid through it yet, a complete profile means you can apply for tenders within hours of publication instead of days. The fields are mostly the same as your existing SQ master document, so it is a copy job rather than fresh writing.
- Track Planned Procurement Notices for your sector. A weekly review of PPNs is the single highest-return activity in modern public sector bidding. Most suppliers do not bother, which is exactly why those who do are winning more.
- Develop a social value narrative once, reuse it everywhere. Themes, outcomes, and case studies should be templated. Bespoke writing for each bid is wasted effort given how consistent the weightings have become. Build a library covering the social value outcomes buyers most often select, with at least two specific commitments for each.
What is coming next
The Cabinet Office continues to issue guidance and secondary legislation to refine how the Act works in practice. The procurement community generally sees these as refinements rather than another overhaul.
There is also pressure from SME representative groups for tighter rules on direct awards and faster payment from public buyers (30-day payment terms are implied into public contracts under the Act and flow down the supply chain, but late payment remains a common complaint). Both are likely to feature in phase two consultation, though neither is expected to change the day-to-day mechanics of how tenders are run.
TenderSignal monitors Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and 600+ buyer portals, including Planned Procurement Notices, and matches them to your business profile. Set up free in two minutes.
For a primer on the Act itself rather than this anniversary review, see our Procurement Act 2023 suppliers' guide.