Public sector procurement software, built for PA23.

Who counts as a contracting authority, and why it matters

The Procurement Act 2023 applies to contracting authorities, which is a wider group than most people assume. It covers central government departments and their arm's length bodies, local authorities, NHS bodies, police, fire and rescue, education institutions, and many bodies governed by public law that are financed or controlled by the state. Utilities are treated separately as private utilities or utilities that are also contracting authorities, with their own set of relaxations. Getting your own status right is the first decision, because it sets which rules bite.

Status drives practical things: whether you can charge suppliers to join a dynamic market, which thresholds apply, which notices you must publish, and how much freedom you have to shape a competitive flexible procedure. It also drives what your software has to prove. A body that is only partly in scope still needs an audit trail that shows why a given route was chosen for a given spend.

In practice, most organisations sit somewhere on a spectrum. A registered provider of social housing may be in scope for some activity and not others. A charity delivering a public service under grant may not be a contracting authority at all, but will still face funder conditions that look very like procurement rules. Systems that hard code one interpretation of scope become a problem within a year.

Councils and local authorities

Councils buy the widest range of anything in the public sector: adult social care placements, children's services, highways and street lighting, waste and recycling, ICT, temporary staff, grounds maintenance, professional services and capital works. Volume is high and value per transaction is often low, so the below threshold layer matters more than the headline OJEU style competitions ever did. Contract standing orders and the constitution sit on top of the Act, adding local approval gates that software has to model rather than ignore.

The pressures are familiar: reduced real terms funding, demand led social care spend that is hard to forecast, and elected member scrutiny that arrives at short notice. Procurement teams are often small and split across directorates, with a central team that sets policy and devolved buyers who do the work. Any system that only works when a trained category manager is driving it will fail on the volume that sits outside the central team.

What a council system needs to handle is therefore breadth rather than depth alone: light touch regimes for care and social services, framework and dynamic market call offs, quick quote workflows below threshold, contract registers that satisfy the local transparency code, and social value scoring that can be defended in a committee report. It also needs to make the pipeline visible, because forward plans are how councils avoid the annual scramble of expiring contracts.

• Devolved buying across directorates with a central policy team
• High volume, low value spend that dominates transaction counts
• Care and social services under the light touch regime
• Constitutional approval gates layered on top of statutory rules
• Local transparency code publication alongside Act notices

NHS trusts and integrated care boards

NHS procurement splits into clinical and non clinical. Clinical services largely sit under the Provider Selection Regime, which has its own decision making processes and standstill arrangements. Most other spend, including goods, estates, facilities, digital and professional services, runs under the Procurement Act. Trusts also buy heavily through national and regional frameworks, so a large share of activity is call off and mini competition rather than open market tendering.

Integrated care boards add a layer of collaboration. Decisions are increasingly made at system level, with several trusts, primary care and local authority partners involved in the same sourcing exercise. That creates a governance problem more than a sourcing problem: who evaluates, who approves, who signs, and how you evidence that a partner organisation did not see something it should not have seen. Timescales slip when each partner applies its own scheme of delegation to the same award decision.

Software for the NHS has to cope with clinical evaluation panels who are not procurement professionals, with product level detail that runs to thousands of lines, and with medical device and information governance assurance sitting alongside the commercial evaluation. It also has to keep the audit trail intact when a competition spans multiple organisations with different approval thresholds, different reporting cycles and different information governance policies.

Housing associations and registered providers

Registered providers occupy an awkward middle ground. Many are in scope as contracting authorities for the majority of their spend, while operating with the commercial disciplines of a private business. Their buying is dominated by repairs and maintenance, planned works, compliance servicing across gas, electrical, fire and asbestos, development contracts and managing agent arrangements. Contract values are large and terms are long, which makes contract management more consequential than the tender itself.

Building safety obligations have raised the assurance bar. Providers now need to prove that contractors and their subcontractors hold current accreditations, that operatives are competent, and that remediation work is documented to a standard that survives regulatory inspection. That is supplier assurance as an ongoing activity, not a one off questionnaire completed at tender stage. Certificates expire mid contract, subcontractors change without notice, and the provider carries the regulatory consequence either way.

Tenant voice is the other distinguishing feature. Residents increasingly sit on evaluation panels or feed into service specifications, which means the system has to let non specialists score fairly, with moderation that reconciles their views against technical scores without discarding them. Panel briefing, clear scoring guidance and a written moderation record matter more here than anywhere else, because a resident scorer cannot be expected to know procurement law. Our housing pages cover this in more detail for providers reviewing their approach.

Schools, academy trusts, colleges and universities

Education procurement runs at very different scales. A single maintained school buys with almost no procurement resource and leans on the local authority or a buying organisation. A large multi academy trust runs a central team across dozens of sites, with the Academy Trust Handbook setting approval and reporting expectations on top of the Act. Colleges and universities operate as autonomous institutions with their own regulations, consortium memberships and research funding conditions.

Common spend covers catering, cleaning, ICT and devices, curriculum resources, energy, capital works and estates, plus student facing services in higher education. Seasonality is severe: summer is when work happens, and tender timetables that ignore term dates simply do not get evaluated. Frameworks and aggregated buying dominate, because most institutions do not have the capacity to run full competitions on every requirement across a busy academic year.

The practical requirement is delegation without loss of control. A trust needs school level buyers to raise requests and run quick quotes inside a set of rules, while the central team keeps visibility of aggregate spend, contract expiry and supplier concentration. Universities need the same at faculty level, with research grant conditions attached to specific purchases and funder audit rights that reach into the underlying procurement record years after the equipment was bought.

Blue light, charities and utilities

Police, fire and ambulance services buy vehicles, uniform, protective equipment, radio and control room technology, and estates services, usually through regional collaborations and national arrangements. Operational urgency is real, so direct award justifications and emergency provisions need to be recorded properly at the time rather than reconstructed afterwards. Collaboration across forces means shared specifications and shared evaluation panels are normal.

Charities and the wider third sector sit on both sides. Larger charities delivering public services are often subject to funder procurement conditions and may be contracting authorities in their own right. Smaller organisations are more often bidders, and they struggle with the volume of assurance documentation. Buyers who want a diverse supplier base need proportionate requirements at the below threshold layer, not the same pack used for a multi million pound contract.

Utilities in water, energy and transport work under the utilities rules. The Act replaced qualification systems with utilities dynamic markets, and utilities may charge suppliers membership and award fees and may run member only tenders. That is a genuine difference from general contracting authorities, which may not charge membership fees, and any system used across a mixed group has to support both models.

Dynamic Markets and G-Cloud 15

The Act replaced the Dynamic Purchasing System with Dynamic Markets, and the difference is more than a name. Dynamic markets are permanently open, membership cannot be capped, applications must be assessed within a reasonable time, and pending applications must be considered before a competition concludes. For buyers that means the market becomes a live list to be managed continuously rather than a fixed shortlist created once. For suppliers it means the door does not close.

That changes what software has to do. Applications arrive at any time, so assessment needs a workflow and a service level rather than a bulk exercise every few years. Membership conditions have to be applied consistently and evidenced, because a rejected applicant will ask why. Competitions launched from the market need to check for pending applications before they conclude, which is a scheduling problem as much as a compliance one.

For buying the software itself, eSourcing Data is available to public buyers 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 a buyer can run a search on the Digital Marketplace, compare services against published terms, and call off without running a full competition where the framework rules allow.

Below threshold, light touch and proportionality

Most public sector transactions never reach the threshold for a full regulated competition, and this is where the greatest efficiency gains sit. The Act sets specific duties for below threshold contracts, including notice obligations for certain values and restrictions on how authorities can limit participation. Local standing orders usually go further, setting quote counts and approval levels. Software should encode that ladder so buyers see the correct route without needing to interpret the rules themselves.

The light touch regime applies to specified services, largely social, health, education and some community services, with longer minimum timescales and more procedural freedom. It is not an exemption. Councils and NHS bodies using it still need clear award criteria, a defensible evaluation record and correct notices. The common failure is treating light touch as unstructured and then being unable to explain the decision.

Proportionality cuts both ways. Asking a small charity or local trades business for a full financial standing pack on a low value contract suppresses competition and drives up prices. Asking too little on a high risk service creates delivery failure. A system that carries tiered question sets by value and risk band solves most of this without a policy debate on every requirement.

Social value, transparency and audit

Social value is now embedded in how public bodies award contracts, with local economic outcomes, employment, skills, environmental impact and community benefit weighted into evaluation. The persistent weakness is measurement after award. Commitments made in a bid become contractual obligations, and if nobody tracks delivery the weighting was decorative. Recording social value commitments as measurable contract KPIs at award, then reporting against them, is what turns policy into outcome.

The Act's transparency regime runs across the contract lifecycle: planned procurement and pipeline notices, tender and transparency notices, contract award and contract details notices, and performance information on larger contracts. Publication is not an afterthought at the end. It is a sequence of obligations that need to fire at the right point, which is exactly the sort of thing software should handle rather than a spreadsheet reminder.

Audit follows transparency. Internal audit, external audit and, for some bodies, regulatory inspection will ask why a route was chosen, how scores were reached, who moderated, who approved and whether declared interests were managed. The answer needs to be a system record with timestamps, not a reconstruction from email. Where the record is complete, challenges get resolved quickly and cheaply.

• Social value commitments converted into contract KPIs at award
• Notice obligations sequenced across the full lifecycle
• Conflict of interest declarations captured per panel member
• Immutable evaluation and moderation records with timestamps

How eSourcing Data supports public sector organisations

eSourcing Data covers source to contract in one place: sourcing and tendering, supplier onboarding and assurance, evaluation and moderation, contract management, governance and audit, analytics and reporting, and below threshold workflows. The design assumption is that a public body runs several very different processes at once, from a two quote purchase to a multi organisation collaborative competition, and needs the same audit standard across all of them. Data is held with UK data residency and the platform is GDPR compliant.

For shared services and collaborative buying, the system supports multiple organisations working inside one competition with separate approval routes and controlled visibility, which is the practical blocker in most system level NHS and regional council arrangements. For devolved structures such as academy trusts or council directorates, local buyers work inside rules set centrally, and the centre keeps a live view of spend, contract expiry and supplier concentration without having to chase individual sites for returns.

Suppliers meet the same organisation through our sister platforms: WinAContract offers free UK tender search at winacontract.co.uk, and BidWriter provides AI assisted bid writing at bid.winacontract.co.uk. Buyers who want to understand the underlying guidance can use the Procurement Library, which sets out the official Procurement Act 2023 guidance, Procurement Policy Notes and commercial playbooks in one reference set, so teams can check the source rather than rely on second hand summaries.