It has been a year since the Procurement Act 2023 went live. Here is what changed in practice, what did not, and the moves UK suppliers should make now.
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 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 every bid you submit through any UK public sector portal. No more uploading the same Selection Questionnaire evidence and Companies House extract to fourteen different tenders.
Adoption has been faster than expected. Roughly 70% of new central government tenders now reference the CDP supplier profile, and most large councils have followed. The remaining laggards are housing associations, NHS trusts, and university procurement consortia, who are still running parallel processes on their own platforms. Within another year that gap should close further as the consortia frameworks come up for renewal under the new regime.
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. We see roughly 800 to 1,200 PPNs published per month across the UK public sector. Most suppliers still ignore them entirely, which means the ones who pay attention have an outsized advantage.
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 in genuine emergencies, where there is provably one supplier, or under specific frameworks. 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 were varying wildly in 2024, anywhere from 10% to 30% of evaluation score depending on buyer. They have now mostly settled at 10% to 20%, with the higher end reserved for community-impact contracts (housing, social care, regeneration). The Crown Commercial Service guidance has been adopted widely as the de facto template.
The five Crown Commercial Service themes (community recovery, jobs and skills, supply chain resilience, climate, wellbeing) appear in nearly every public sector tender now. Buyers select one to three themes most relevant to the contract, and expect specific, measurable commitments. The era of generic social value waffle is over.
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. Ten working days between award notification and contract signature is unchanged, and the mandatory disclosure of evaluation summaries to losing bidders has produced more challenges, not fewer. Buyers report more requests for feedback and more pre-action correspondence than before the Act.
The Cabinet Office is working on phase two amendments to address gaps the first year exposed, particularly around concession contracts, defence procurement, and the interaction with utilities regulations. Expect formal consultation in mid-2026 and possible regulatory changes by early 2027. 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 (the current 30-day payment commitment is widely ignored in practice). 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 140+ other UK procurement portals, including all 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.