No conflicts to declare is not an excuse to skip the conflicts assessment
Conflicts of interest failures in public procurement rarely start with dishonesty. They start with sequencing. A team gathers declarations, finds nothing alarming, publishes the tender notice and intends to write the assessment up properly later. Under the Procurement Act 2023 that order is the wrong way round: the conflicts assessment has to be prepared before the tender notice, transparency notice or dynamic market notice is published, and it has to be prepared even when the authority has identified no conflicts at all.
The nil return is still a deliverable
The template is unambiguous that the requirement applies even if the contracting authority identifies no actual, potential or perceived conflicts of interest. That surprises people, because a document recording nothing feels like paperwork for its own sake.
It is not. The value of the nil assessment is that it forces the authority to list who is involved, what their role is, and how conflicts information was obtained from each of them. Most of the time the useful output is not a discovered conflict, it is the discovery that three people who shaped the specification were never asked.
It also creates a baseline. If something surfaces at month eight of a two year contract, the difference between an authority that can show what it checked and when, and one that can only say it saw no problems, is substantial.
The supplier columns are the ones that matter under challenge
Plenty of conflicts records stop at the individual: who declared what, and what they agreed to do about it. The template goes further, and deliberately. Section two asks which suppliers are impacted. Section three then asks, for each impacted supplier, whether further actions are required to remove an unfair advantage or disadvantage, what those actions are and when they were taken.
That is the fairness question rather than the propriety question, and it is the one a disappointed bidder will actually raise. An individual can be perfectly well mitigated while a competitor still holds an information advantage that the authority never addressed.
Section four closes the loop with the hardest outcome: suppliers excluded from the procurement due to an unfair advantage, with the reason and the date the supplier was notified. If that step is ever needed, the contemporaneous record is what makes it stand up.
The review duty runs to the end of the contract, and that is where records lapse
When an authority publishes the relevant notices it confirms that a conflicts assessment has been prepared and reviewed and revised as necessary, until the end of the contract. In other words, the obligation follows the contract, not the tender.
This is exactly where paper based practice breaks down. Ownership passes from the procurement team to a contract manager, the assessment sits in a folder nobody opens, and the review dates in Part B stop being filled in. Meanwhile people change jobs, suppliers are acquired and modifications are agreed.
The template's advice to create a new version on each revision, keeping the old one for the record, is worth following. A single overwritten file cannot show what the authority knew at any given point, and that is precisely what an investigation asks.
Adapt the format, not the obligation
Authorities are free to reshape this. The template says use is not mandatory and that it can be adapted, for example into a spreadsheet or held within an electronic system, to fit organisational processes.
The condition attached is the important half of the sentence: any approach must still comply with the Procurement Act 2023 and other legislation such as data protection law. A conflicts assessment is a file of named people, their relationships and their financial interests, and the template requires it to be stored securely and handled sensitively.
So by all means move it into a system. Just make sure the system captures the same things the template does, keeps a version history, prompts the reviews and restricts who can read it.
The takeaways
- Prepare the conflicts assessment before publishing the tender, transparency or dynamic market notice, not afterwards.
- A nil assessment is still required, and forcing yourself to list everyone involved is where the value sits.
- Follow the supplier columns through: mitigation of the individual is not the same as removing an unfair advantage between bidders.
- The review duty runs until the end of the contract, so hand ownership over explicitly at award.
- You can adapt the format into a spreadsheet or system, but not the Procurement Act 2023 or data protection obligations behind it.
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