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Procurement Act 2023

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The problems we were built to solve.

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Everything you need to run procurement properly.

Who this is for and what changed in 2025

This page is written for people who commission and buy on behalf of the public: category managers and procurement officers in councils, NHS trusts and integrated care boards, housing associations, schools and multi academy trusts, universities, blue light services, central government bodies, arm's length organisations and regulated utilities. The common thread is accountability. Someone will eventually ask why a supplier was chosen, what the contract has delivered and whether the money was well spent, and the answer needs to be evidenced rather than remembered.

The Procurement Act 2023 changed the shape of that accountability. It consolidated several older regimes, introduced a single set of competitive procedures, put transparency notices across the whole life of a contract rather than only at the start, and replaced Dynamic Purchasing Systems with Dynamic Markets. Utilities qualification systems became utilities dynamic markets. For most buying teams the day to day sourcing work feels familiar, but the volume and timing of published information is materially different.

The practical effect is that procurement records now have to be produced as work happens, not assembled afterwards. A notice that should have been published at award cannot be reconstructed convincingly six months later, and a contract performance assessment is only credible if the underlying data was captured while the contract was running. That is the gap most authorities are trying to close, and it is a systems problem as much as a policy one.

Planning and pipeline: the work before the tender

Most avoidable procurement failure happens before anyone opens a portal. Requirements arrive late, budgets are approved on assumptions nobody tested, and a contract expiry surprises the service that depends on it. A visible forward pipeline fixes a surprising amount of this. When every current contract has an owner, an expiry date and a next step, the organisation can see what is coming twelve to eighteen months out and give itself time to think rather than time to react.

Planning also has a published dimension now. Authorities are expected to signal significant upcoming requirements so the market can prepare, and larger organisations are expected to set out how they will approach procurement over time. Those obligations are far easier to meet when the pipeline already exists as structured data rather than as a spreadsheet held by one person. The published view becomes an export of something the organisation genuinely uses, which is the only version that stays accurate.

eSourcing Data holds the pipeline alongside the contract register, so a renewal is not a new record typed from scratch but a continuation of an existing one. Owners get reminders at sensible intervals, category leads see aggregate spend and expiry clusters, and finance can see where commitments fall across financial years. It gives teams a defensible answer to the question senior officers ask most often, which is simply what is coming next and who is dealing with it.

• Contract register with owners, values, expiry dates and extension options
• Forward pipeline grouped by category, service area and financial year
• Automated reminders before decision points, not after them
• Early market engagement records linked to the requirement they informed

Market engagement done properly

Talking to suppliers before a competition is legitimate and usually sensible. The risk is not the conversation, it is the asymmetry: one supplier gains insight the others do not have, or a specification quietly reflects one product. Preliminary market engagement should therefore be structured, offered on equal terms and recorded. Where engagement has shaped a requirement, the authority should be able to show what it heard, what it changed and how it levelled the field before the competition opened.

Good engagement is also commercially useful. It tells you whether the market can deliver at the volumes and timescales you assume, whether your payment terms are workable for smaller firms, and whether the social value outcomes you want are realistic in that sector. Suppliers are usually candid at this stage because nothing is at stake. Ignoring that intelligence and going straight to a specification is how authorities end up with a single compliant bid at an uncomfortable price.

In eSourcing Data, engagement events, questionnaires and responses sit in the same record as the eventual procurement. Attendance, materials issued and questions asked are logged, so the audit trail shows equal access rather than asserting it. If a supplier later challenges the process, the evidence is already in place and did not need to be gathered under pressure months after the people involved have moved on.

Sourcing and tendering across procedures

The Act gives authorities a competitive flexible procedure alongside the open procedure, which means the design of a competition is now a deliberate choice rather than a template. You decide how many stages there are, whether and how you shortlist, whether negotiation or dialogue is needed, and how refinement is handled. That freedom is welcome, but it raises the stakes on documentation: whatever you design, you must publish it clearly and then follow it exactly.

A tendering system earns its keep by making that discipline the path of least resistance. Timetables, clarification windows, document issue and bid receipt all need to be controlled and timestamped. Late bids should be impossible to accept accidentally. Clarifications should reach every participant at once. Amendments should be versioned so it is obvious which document a bidder was working from. These are unglamorous controls, and they are exactly what disputes turn on.

eSourcing Data supports open and multi stage competitions, framework call offs, mini competitions, direct award justifications and below threshold routes in one environment. Templates carry standard selection questions and conditions of participation so teams are not rewriting boilerplate, while the specification and evaluation model stay specific to the requirement. Buyers keep flexibility over process design without losing the consistency that makes a portfolio of procurements auditable.

Evaluation, moderation and defensible decisions

Evaluation is where challenges concentrate, and almost always for the same reasons: scores that do not match the published criteria, moderation that changed marks without recorded reasoning, or feedback that reveals a rationale never set out in the tender. The remedy is simple in principle. Publish the award criteria and weightings, score against those criteria only, record the reasoning for every score, and make moderation a documented conversation rather than an averaging exercise.

Practically, that means independent scoring before evaluators see each other's marks, a moderator who tests consistency rather than pushing consensus, and a clear note wherever a score moves. Conflicts of interest should be declared at the start and revisited if the bidder list produces a surprise. Where price and quality are combined, the arithmetic should be visible and repeatable, because a formula that cannot be explained to an unsuccessful bidder will not survive scrutiny.

The platform structures this end to end. Panels are assembled with declared interests, scores are captured with mandatory comments, moderation records the before and after with rationale, and the resulting assessment summary feeds directly into award notices and standstill correspondence. Feedback to unsuccessful bidders is generated from the same evidence the panel used, which removes the common failure of a debrief that quietly contradicts the scoring record.

Dynamic Markets and buying through G-Cloud 15

Dynamic Markets replaced Dynamic Purchasing Systems and behave differently in ways that matter operationally. They are permanently open, membership cannot be capped, applications must be assessed within a reasonable period, and a pending application has to be considered before a competition run through the market concludes. That last point catches teams out. A market cannot be treated as a closed list once a competition is under way, so admission processing needs to be routine rather than something done in batches when someone remembers.

There is also a difference by sector. Utilities operating in water, energy and transport may charge suppliers membership and award fees and may run tenders limited to members. General contracting authorities may not charge membership fees. Any authority setting up a market should therefore be clear which regime it is operating under before it writes the conditions of membership, because the commercial model and the supplier communications follow from that decision.

For buyers who would rather use an established route, eSourcing Data software is available through RM1557.15 G-Cloud 15, with 28 software services listed on the Digital Marketplace alongside cloud support services. Framework purchases are made as call off contracts, so the terms are already set and the buying exercise is a comparison and selection rather than a full competition. Teams often use that route for speed while running their own Dynamic Markets for the categories where they need continuous supplier access.

• Permanently open membership with no cap on numbers
• Applications assessed within a reasonable time and before competitions conclude
• Utilities may charge membership and award fees, general authorities may not
• G-Cloud 15 purchases made as call off contracts under RM1557.15

Award, transparency notices and standstill

Transparency under the Act is continuous rather than a single publication event. Depending on the route and value, an authority may need to publish notices covering planning, tender, award, contract details, changes to a contract and eventual termination, and for larger contracts performance information at intervals. Missing one is rarely deliberate. It usually happens because the person who knows the contract has moved on and nobody was tracking what was still due.

Standstill deserves the same discipline. The point of the period is to give unsuccessful bidders a genuine opportunity to understand the decision and, if necessary, challenge it before the contract is entered into. Rushed or vague feedback shortens nothing and often invites the very challenge the authority hoped to avoid. Clear reasons, scores against published criteria and the characteristics of the winning bid are the substance that makes standstill work as intended.

eSourcing Data keeps a schedule of notice obligations attached to each procurement and contract, prompts the responsible owner before deadlines and holds the published content with the record it came from. Where an authority publishes to a central platform, the underlying data is already assembled and consistent, which reduces the correction cycles that follow rushed submissions and the risk of a notice being published with figures that do not match the award record.

Contract management and supplier assurance

Value is realised after signature, but that is where most procurement systems stop. A contract that is not actively managed drifts: performance reporting lapses, variations are agreed by email, and the renewal arrives with nobody able to say whether the supplier performed. Active management means named owners, agreed measures, a regular review rhythm and a single record of every change made to scope, price or duration during the term.

Supplier assurance runs alongside it. Insurance certificates expire, accreditations lapse, financial standing changes and modern slavery or cyber requirements get updated. Chasing this by email produces a folder of PDFs nobody trusts. Holding it as structured, dated data with automatic expiry reminders means the position is knowable at any moment, which is what internal audit and the section 151 officer actually want to see.

The platform links assurance to the contracts and markets that depend on it, so a lapsed certificate is visible to the contract owner rather than sitting unread in a shared inbox. Performance data captured during the term feeds the assessments that larger contracts require, and the same record supports renewal decisions with evidence rather than impressions formed in the final weeks of a term.

• Named contract owners with review dates and escalation routes
• Variations and extensions recorded against the original award
• Insurance, accreditation and policy documents with expiry tracking
• Performance measures captured during the term, not reconstructed at renewal

Below threshold, governance and audit

Below threshold spend is where most authorities have the least visibility and the most exposure. Individually small purchases are routed around the procurement team, split across cost centres and evidenced inconsistently. The fix is proportionate process rather than heavy process: a simple request route, clear thresholds for the number of quotes required, standard terms, and a record that exists automatically because the buyer used the route rather than despite it.

Governance benefits immediately. If every below threshold award produces a record with a reason, a value and an owner, aggregate spend by supplier becomes visible and the authority can see where a category has quietly grown into something that should be competed properly. That is usually the finding that generates audit recommendations, and it is far easier to prevent than to explain.

eSourcing Data provides below threshold workflows alongside full competitions, with role based permissions, approval chains and an immutable activity log across both. The audit trail is a by product of doing the work rather than a separate exercise, which is the only arrangement that survives contact with a busy team. Data is held in the UK and the platform is GDPR compliant.

Analytics, reporting and getting started

Once sourcing, contracts, assurance and below threshold activity share one data model, reporting stops being a quarterly scramble. Category spend, supplier concentration, local and small business share, social value commitments against delivery, cycle times by procedure and upcoming expiry volumes can all be produced from live records. That changes the conversation with members and boards, because the numbers describe what is happening now rather than what was true when the last spreadsheet was compiled.

Getting started rarely means a single migration. Most authorities begin with the area causing pain, often the contract register or evaluation, and extend once the team trusts the data. Buyers can procure the software through G-Cloud 15 as a call off contract, or discuss requirements directly if a wider source to contract programme is planned. Suppliers looking for the other side of this picture can use WinAContract for free UK tender search and BidWriter for AI assisted bid writing.