The Procurement Act 2023 went live on 24 February 2025. More than eighteen months on, a lot of suppliers are still bidding exactly as they did under the old regulations — and missing the parts of the new regime that were put there for their benefit.
This is not a legal briefing. It is what changed that you can actually use.
The short version
The Act replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and its sister regulations with a single framework for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It did not replace Scottish procurement law: devolved Scottish authorities — councils, NHS boards, universities, Scottish Government bodies — still run under the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015. If you sell in Scotland, most of what follows does not apply to your Scottish buyers.
Contracts that started before February 2025 still run under the old rules, which is why you still see F02 contract notices alongside UK4 tender notices. That tail will take years to disappear.
One registration, reused
The biggest practical change is the central digital platform, which is Find a Tender with a supplier information service attached.
You register once and give the standard set of facts about your business: Companies House number, addresses, website, two years of accounts, people with significant control, and the declarations about convictions and connected persons. That information is then shared into each bid instead of being retyped into a fresh form every time.
Two things worth knowing. If you had a Find a Tender account before the Act, it did not carry over — you had to register again. And you only need to be registered at the point you want to bid, not to browse; viewing opportunities is free and always has been.
It does not abolish selection questionnaires. Buyers still ask their own conditions-of-participation questions on top. It does remove the most tedious layer of re-keying.
Notices: far more of them, and the useful ones come first
The old world had contract notices and award notices. The Act has a numbered series, and the early ones are where the advantage is.
| Notice | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| UK1 Pipeline notice | A buyer that will spend £100m or more in the coming year listing the contracts over £2m it plans to award in the next 18 months. Published between 1 April and 26 May. |
| UK2 Preliminary market engagement notice | The buyer is talking to the market before writing the specification, and is telling you how to join in. |
| UK3 Planned procurement notice | Advance warning of a specific competition. Can shorten the eventual tendering period, so seeing it early matters. |
| UK4 Tender notice | The competition is open. This is the one everyone waits for. |
| UK5 Transparency notice | A direct award is about to happen, without competition. |
| UK6 Contract award notice | The decision has been made; the standstill clock is running. |
| UK7 Contract details notice | The contract is signed. For contracts over £5m it names the three KPIs the buyer regards as most material. |
| UK9 Contract performance notice | How the incumbent is actually performing against those KPIs, or that they breached the contract. |
| UK13–UK16 | Dynamic market notices: a market is opening, is open, has changed members, or has closed. |
| UK17 Payments compliance notice | How promptly that buyer actually pays its suppliers. |
Most suppliers watch UK4 and ignore the rest. That is backwards. By the time a tender notice is published, the specification is fixed, the budget is set, and someone who attended the market engagement day has already shaped it. UK1, UK2 and UK3 are where a bid is won.
UK9 and UK17 are quietly useful in a different way: they tell you whether an incumbent is struggling, and whether a buyer pays on time.
The competitive flexible procedure
The Act kept the open procedure and replaced everything else with one broad option: the competitive flexible procedure. A buyer can now design its own process — multiple rounds, negotiation, demonstrations, prototypes, dialogue — as long as it is proportionate and set out up front.
In practice that means you can no longer assume you know the shape of a competition from its name. Read the tender documents to find out how many stages there are, whether there is negotiation, and what gets scored at which stage. Two competitions for similar work can now run completely differently.
Most advantageous tender
Award is now on the most advantageous tender, not the most economically advantageous tender. Dropping "economically" was deliberate: it signals that price does not have to dominate, and that quality and social value are legitimate grounds to pay more.
Do not over-read it. Plenty of buyers still weight price at 60% or more. But the language of the Act, and central government's social value policy on top of it, make a purely lowest-price award harder to defend than it was.
Feedback you are now owed
Under the old rules, losing bidders got a standstill letter of wildly varying quality. Under the Act, the buyer must give each bidder an assessment summary — its assessment of that supplier's own final tender, and of the winning tender — before the standstill period begins.
The mandatory standstill is eight working days from publication of the contract award notice. That is your window to read the assessment, compare your scores against the winner's, and raise a concern before the contract is signed.
Read it properly every single time, including on bids you did not expect to win. It is the only free, structured feedback on your bid writing you will ever get, and it is the fastest way to find out that you are losing on one repeated, fixable weakness.
Getting paid
Thirty-day payment terms are implied into public contracts and flow down the supply chain, so a subcontractor on a public contract benefits even without a direct relationship with the buyer. Contracting authorities have to publish payment compliance data. If a buyer is slow, it is now a matter of public record rather than rumour.
What did not change
- Scotland. Different law, different portal, different thresholds.
- The need to meet the specification. The Act made procurement more flexible, not more forgiving.
- The fact that most of it sits on a portal you have to go and look at. Transparency obligations produce notices; they do not deliver them to you.
- Below-threshold advertising. Still £12,000 including VAT for central government, £30,000 for everyone else.
What to do this month
- Register on Find a Tender and complete the supplier information properly, once.
- Set a reminder for April and May to read the pipeline notices of the five buyers you most want to work with.
- Start responding to preliminary market engagement notices in your sector, even when you are not sure you would bid.
- Ask for and read the assessment summary on every bid you lose.
TendersHub tracks 10,500+ live UK tenders across the national, devolved and platform portals, including the advance notices — pipeline, market engagement and planned procurement — that most suppliers never see until it is too late to use them.