Procurement Act 2023: What Suppliers Must Know in 2027

What the Procurement Act 2023 is, and who it covers

The Procurement Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023 and came into force on 24 February 2025. It replaced four sets of EU-derived regulations — the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, the Utilities Contracts Regulations 2016, the Concession Contracts Regulations 2016 and the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011 — with one Act and the regulations made under it.

It applies to public buyers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland — central government and its agencies, local authorities, NHS bodies, police and fire authorities and other public bodies — and to utilities. Three main groups of opportunities sit outside it:

The Act also sets objectives every buyer must have regard to: delivering value for money, maximising public benefit, sharing information, and acting, and being seen to act, with integrity. Buyers must have regard to the barriers small and medium-sized enterprises face and consider whether they can be removed or reduced, and must consider whether a contract could be split into lots, giving reasons if they decide not to.

The dates that matter in 2027

Thresholds include VAT under the Act. Check the current figures in our guide to UK procurement thresholds before relying on one.

What changed from the Public Contracts Regulations 2015

Plenty is unchanged. Requirements are still advertised, tenders are still assessed against published criteria, CPV codes still classify notices, and suppliers can still challenge a decision in court. These are the differences that change how you bid:

The Central Digital Platform and Find a Tender's bigger role

Under the 2015 Regulations, Find a Tender — which replaced the EU's Official Journal for UK buyers from 1 January 2021 — carried above-threshold adverts and award notices, and Contracts Finder carried English contracts, including lower-value ones. Under the Act, Find a Tender is the public face of the Central Digital Platform: the government system where buyers publish the notices the Act requires and where suppliers register.

To bid in an above-threshold procurement under the Act, you register your organisation on the platform, signing in with GOV.UK One Login, and record your core supplier information: basic details about the business, its economic and financial standing, its connected persons (such as directors and people with significant control), and declarations against the exclusion grounds. You keep it up to date and share it with each buyer you bid to, by the end of the tendering period at the latest, so you are not re-entering the same company details every time; the buyer's own questions then cover what is specific to the procurement. If you win a below-threshold contract that needs a contract details notice, you must be registered before the buyer publishes it.

Find a Tender now carries a notice at each stage of a contract's life, so it shows much more than open tenders:

Contracts Finder has not gone away: procurements started under the old rules still publish there until 1 May 2027, when their notices move to the central digital platform, and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland keep their own portals. Our guide to Find a Tender vs Contracts Finder explains which carries what. PSIP aggregates all five official portals — Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI — into one search, reading Find a Tender and Contracts Finder hourly through the working day and the other three daily.

The competitive flexible procedure: a process the buyer designs

Under the 2015 Regulations a buyer chose from a menu — open, restricted, competitive procedure with negotiation, competitive dialogue or innovation partnership — each with its own conditions for use. The Act keeps a single-stage open procedure, where any supplier can submit a tender, and replaces the rest with the competitive flexible procedure: any other competitive process the buyer considers appropriate for the contract.

The procedure must be proportionate to the nature, complexity and cost of the contract, and the tender notice and tender documents must tell you how it will run. Stages a buyer can build in include:

The contract goes to the most advantageous tender, judged against the award criteria and their relative importance as published. That replaces the old most economically advantageous tender test: you win on the buyer's criteria as weighted, so price decides only as far as its weighting allows. If the procedure provides for it, the buyer can refine the award criteria between stages, so re-read them at each stage. Where social value is one of the criteria, it is scored like any other — see our guide to social value in public sector procurement.

In practice: before you commit a bid team, map every stage, what is assessed at each and the dates. A competitive flexible procedure with negotiation rounds can need senior people over a longer period than an open tender of the same value.

Open frameworks and dynamic markets

Frameworks still work much as they did. A buyer appoints suppliers to a framework, then awards call-off contracts under it, directly or by a further competition among the framework's suppliers, as the framework's terms allow. A standard framework is still normally limited to four years, and once it is awarded, suppliers outside it wait for the replacement.

The Act adds the open framework: a scheme of successive frameworks on substantially the same terms, which must reopen to new suppliers at least once in its first three years and can run for up to eight years in total. An open framework first awarded in 2025 has to reopen before the end of 2028, so watch during 2027 and 2028 for reopenings of open frameworks you missed.

Dynamic purchasing systems are replaced by dynamic markets. A supplier that meets a dynamic market's conditions of membership can apply to join at any time while it is open, and contracts under it are competed among its members.

Our guides to public sector frameworks and Crown Commercial Service frameworks cover how to get onto them and how call-offs work.

30-day payment terms, down the supply chain

Public contracts awarded under the Act, other than concession contracts and contracts awarded by private utilities or schools, are treated as including a term that the buyer pays a valid, undisputed invoice within 30 days of receiving it. The Act implies the same 30-day term into the sub-contracts used to deliver those contracts, so it covers a prime contractor paying its subcontractors and runs on down the supply chain.

The principle is not new: regulation 113 of the 2015 Regulations required 30-day payment terms in public contracts and required them to be passed down to sub-contracts. The difference is that the Act implies the term by law, so it applies even where nobody wrote it into the sub-contract. Most buyers must also publish a payments compliance notice every six months on how promptly they pay; Northern Ireland's devolved bodies and private utilities are exempt.

Exclusions and the debarment list

The Act sets out mandatory exclusion grounds, such as fraud, bribery and corruption, money laundering, terrorism, and slavery or human trafficking offences, and discretionary ones, such as serious breach of contract or poor performance, insolvency, professional misconduct and competition law infringements. A buyer must disregard a tender from an excluded supplier and may disregard one from an excludable supplier.

The grounds are checked against your organisation and its connected persons, such as directors and people with significant control. Buyers also check associated persons whose capacity you rely on to meet conditions of participation, and can ask about the subcontractors you intend to use. For every ground, the buyer must consider whether the circumstances are continuing or likely to occur again, which is where evidence of putting things right counts: compensation paid, changes of staff or management, new training or monitoring, and the time that has passed.

The debarment list is new. A minister of the Crown keeps a central list of suppliers found, after an investigation, to be excluded or excludable. A supplier listed on a mandatory ground is an excluded supplier in every procurement under the Act for the period of its entry (an entry on national security grounds covers only the contracts it describes); one listed on a discretionary ground can be excluded by any buyer. A listed supplier can apply for removal if its circumstances change, and can appeal the decision in court. The list is published, so check your key subcontractors and partners against it, and answer exclusion questions fully and accurately.

Assessment summaries and the standstill period

Under the 2015 Regulations, bidders received a standstill letter explaining the award decision, with the relative advantages of the winning tender. Under the Act, the buyer must give an assessment summary to every supplier that submitted an assessed tender — the winner included — before it publishes the contract award notice.

The summary explains how your tender was assessed against the award criteria and how the most advantageous tender was assessed, so you can see where the difference lay. Publishing the contract award notice then starts the standstill period: for most contracts, eight working days during which the buyer cannot enter into the contract.

Read your summary the day it arrives. If something looks wrong — a criterion that was not published, a score that does not match its commentary, an arithmetic error — raise it with the buyer at once, and take legal advice quickly if you may challenge, because the time limits are short. Our guide to procurement debriefs covers how to turn feedback into a stronger next bid.

Pipeline notices: the next 18 months, in advance

A contracting authority that expects to spend more than £100 million on contracts in a financial year must publish a pipeline notice within 56 days of the start of that year; private utilities and Northern Ireland's devolved bodies are exempt. It lists the contracts worth more than £2 million that the authority expects to tender, or to award directly, in the 18 months from the start of the year.

For bodies whose financial year starts on 1 April, that puts the 2027–28 notices on Find a Tender by late May 2027, covering contracts expected to come to market up to 30 September 2028. A pipeline notice is a statement of intent, not a commitment: dates slip and plans change. And no smaller buyer, and no contract of £2 million or less, has to appear in one, so pipeline notices add to tender alerts rather than replacing them.

What to do differently when bidding in 2027

The practical changes, roughly in the order you meet them in a bid:

PSIP's tender alerts apply keyword and CPV code filters across all five official portals at once, and run daily, 4-hourly or hourly, depending on your plan.

Frequently asked questions