A trade deal changed your notice rules: the quiet reach of PPN 05/23
Free trade agreements rarely feel like a procurement officer's problem. They are negotiated somewhere else, they concern markets most authorities will never buy from, and the resulting guidance is easy to file. PPN 05/23 is the exception worth noticing, because the three changes it describes are not limited to Australian and New Zealand suppliers. They apply to all procurements going forward, and one of them removes a process option that some authorities were quietly relying on.
The scope trap
The note says it plainly in its first paragraph: although the amendments arise from these particular agreements, they apply to all procurements going forward, not just those involving Australian and New Zealand suppliers. That sentence exists because the natural reading of a trade agreement PPN is the opposite.
The reach covers all contracting authorities within UK public procurement regulations, from central government through the wider public sector, local authorities and NHS bodies to utilities, for procurements above the thresholds in the PCRs, UCRs and CCRs. Authorities whose functions are wholly or mainly Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish devolved functions are outside this note, but the Devolved Administrations will bring the same changes through their own guidance.
So there is no version of this where the rules do not eventually reach your process. The only variable is which document tells you about them.
The change with the widest reach
Of the three amendments, the unknown value rule is the one most likely to bite in practice. Previously the regulations gave methods for estimating contract value to determine whether thresholds apply, and the case where no estimate is possible sat awkwardly. Now, contracts whose value cannot be estimated must be treated as being equal to the relevant threshold and therefore subject to the full regime.
This matters for the requirements that resist valuation: demand-led services with no reliable baseline, open-ended arrangements, pilots that could scale or could stop. The instinct in those cases has often been to proceed lightly and see what happens. That instinct is now wrong.
It also removes a temptation. If uncertainty about value used to be a route out of the full regime, closing it makes the incentive to estimate honestly a little cleaner.
The option that quietly disappeared
Sub-central contracting authorities and utilities could previously use a Prior Information Notice or Periodic Indicative Notice as a call for competition instead of a standard contract notice where certain requirements were met. Once the statutory instrument came into force on 25 May 2023, they can no longer do this.
The risk here is not deliberate non-compliance. It is inherited templates, standing process documents and e-procurement configuration written before that date and never revisited. Procurement processes are sticky, and a route that worked for years leaves traces in a lot of places.
The correction also needs to be precise. Both notice types remain fully available for their other permitted purposes under the relevant regulations. What has gone is one specific use, not the notices themselves, and an over-enthusiastic clean-up can lose useful early market signalling for no reason.
The provision about conduct
The third change is different in character. Existing regulations already stopped procuring entities using options, cancelling a covered procurement or modifying awarded contracts to circumvent the rules. The agreement adds that contracting authorities should not terminate awarded contracts to avoid international obligations, and the statutory instrument makes that an explicit statutory restriction.
In daily practice this will rarely be the reason a termination is contemplated. Its value is that it removes an argument, and it reinforces something several other policy notes already push towards: that termination decisions need documented reasoning showing what actually drove them.
It also fits a pattern already present in the regulations, which prevented procuring entities from using options, cancelling a covered procurement or modifying awarded contracts to circumvent the rules. Termination was the remaining gap in that set, and the amendment simply closes it, so the provision is best understood as completing an existing principle rather than introducing a new one.
The note itself expects all of this to amount to minor technical changes in how practitioners carry out procurements. That is fair. But minor technical changes are precisely the ones that survive undetected in a process for years, so the practical advice is to check the templates rather than to trust the memory.
The takeaways
- The changes apply to all above threshold procurements, not only those involving Australian or New Zealand suppliers.
- A procurement whose value cannot be estimated is now treated as being at the relevant threshold.
- Sub-central authorities and utilities lost the Prior Information Notice call for competition route from 25 May 2023.
- Both notice types remain valid for their other permitted purposes.
- Terminating a contract to avoid international obligations is now an explicit statutory restriction.
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