Have regard is a low bar that most procurement files still fail
The guidance on covered procurement objectives is one of the shortest documents in the Procurement Act 2023 series, and it says one thing: section 12 establishes clear objectives which contracting authorities must have regard to in the undertaking of covered procurement. Brevity here is not an indicator of unimportance. It is a pointer back to the statute, and a duty that reads mildly in a single sentence can be uncomfortable to defend when someone asks what your organisation actually did about it.
The duty is about process, and process leaves traces
Have regard duties are not outcome duties. Nobody has to prove that a procurement maximised any particular objective. What has to be shown is that the objectives were genuinely considered and taken into account when the decisions were made. That is a lower bar in principle and a harder one in practice, because it depends entirely on the record.
The uncomfortable part is timing. Consideration has to be contemporaneous. A well written note explaining, after an award has been questioned, how the objectives informed a decision taken eight months earlier is worth very little. The consideration either shows up in the file at the time or it does not exist.
What most organisations get wrong
The first mistake is a template paragraph. Once the same three sentences about statutory objectives appear on every procurement strategy in the organisation, they have stopped being evidence of consideration and become evidence of a copy and paste habit. Anyone reviewing the file can tell the difference immediately.
The second is putting the consideration in the wrong place. Teams often bolt objectives onto the evaluation stage, because that is where scoring lives and scoring feels like the place where policy is applied. But by evaluation, the decisions that most affect the objectives are already fixed: what was bought, how it was packaged, which route to market was used, how long the timetable allowed suppliers to respond. Consideration belongs at the strategy stage.
The third is treating the duty as ending at award. The Act's definition of covered procurement takes in the award, entry into and management of a public contract. Variations, extensions and performance decisions sit inside that. Most organisations run contract management on a completely separate track with no reference back to the statutory framing at all.
What good looks like
Good looks unglamorous. A short dated record at the strategy stage that names each objective, states what it implies for this procurement in concrete terms, and records the decision made. Where an objective pointed one way and something else outweighed it, that tension is written down rather than smoothed away. A file that records a genuine trade off is more credible than one that claims everything aligned perfectly.
It also looks connected. The same record links forward to the evaluation criteria, the contract terms and the management arrangements, so the reasoning is traceable rather than sitting in an isolated document nobody reads again.
And it looks checked. A periodic sample review, run by commercial leads or internal audit, is what stops the practice degrading into template text within a year. The duty is not hard to meet. It is very easy to stop meeting without noticing.
The takeaways
- Section 12 establishes statutory objectives that contracting authorities must have regard to in covered procurement.
- Have regard is a process duty: the evidence is the record made at the time.
- Consider the objectives at the strategy stage, not at evaluation when the key choices are already fixed.
- Covered procurement includes contract management, so the duty does not end at award.
- Repeated template wording is the clearest sign the duty has stopped being met substantively.
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