The national procurement policy statement: what the NPPS is and what having regard to it means

The key facts

• The NPPS is a statutory statement.
• It allows the Government to set and communicate the wider policy objectives to which it expects public procurement to contribute.
• Contracting authorities are required to have regard to the policy objectives contained within the NPPS.
• The duty applies to the NPPS that is current at the time the authority is carrying out a procurement.
• Because the statement can be replaced, the applicable version is determined by timing rather than being fixed.
• The guidance is technical and aimed at procurement practitioners and commercial policy leads in contracting authorities.
• The guidance documents should be read in conjunction with the Procurement Act 2023 and its associated regulations, and read in full.

What this guidance is and who it applies to

This document is part of the technical guidance series supporting the Procurement Act 2023, and it covers the national procurement policy statement, usually shortened to the NPPS. It is aimed at procurement practitioners and commercial policy leads in contracting authorities, and it is intended to help with interpretation and understanding of the Act rather than to replace the legislation.

As with every document in the series, the guidance should be read in conjunction with the Act and its associated regulations, and the instruction to read the guidance documents in full applies here as elsewhere.

The practical audience is wide. The NPPS shapes how procurements are framed and what they are expected to contribute, so service leads, finance teams and assurance functions all have reason to understand it, as do suppliers who need to know what public buyers are being asked to prioritise.

What the NPPS is

The guidance describes the NPPS as a statutory statement which allows the Government to set and communicate the wider policy objectives to which it expects public procurement to contribute. Two features of that description are important.

First, it is statutory. The NPPS is not a set of recommendations issued alongside the regime. It has a defined place in the legislation, and the obligation attached to it is a legal duty rather than an expectation of good practice.

Second, its function is to communicate wider policy objectives. The NPPS is the mechanism by which government tells contracting authorities what public spending should be contributing to beyond the immediate requirement being bought. Public procurement represents a very large flow of money, and the statement is how the government of the day directs some of that weight towards its priorities without rewriting the procurement rules each time those priorities change.

What the duty requires

The guidance sets out the obligation plainly: contracting authorities are required to have regard to the policy objectives contained within the NPPS that is current at the time they are carrying out a procurement.

The duty is one of having regard. That means the objectives must be genuinely considered and taken into account when decisions are made. It does not mean every procurement must deliver against every objective regardless of circumstance. The weight given to a particular objective is a matter of judgement for the authority, but the consideration itself is not optional, and it has to be real rather than formulaic.

The timing element is the part most often overlooked. The duty attaches to the statement that is current at the time the procurement is being carried out. The NPPS can be replaced, and when it is, the objectives that apply change with it. A procurement running across a change of statement needs to know which version governs its decisions, and an organisation whose templates quote an older statement will be evidencing regard to the wrong document.

Practically, this means the NPPS cannot be treated as a one off implementation task. It is a live document that has to be monitored, and the organisation's process materials have to be capable of being updated when it changes.

Applying it in practice

The strongest evidence of having regard is a contemporaneous record made at the point decisions are taken, ideally at the procurement strategy stage. That record should name the current statement, identify the objectives relevant to this procurement, and state what they mean for it in concrete terms: what was included in the specification, how the requirement was packaged, what the evaluation will reward.

Where an objective was considered and given limited weight because of the nature of the requirement, that reasoning should be recorded too. A file that shows a considered judgement, including where objectives pulled in different directions, is more credible than one that claims universal alignment.

Organisations should also assign clear ownership for monitoring the NPPS and updating templates when a new statement is published, with a defined position on what happens to procurements already underway. Without that, the version quoted in templates drifts out of date quietly, and the drift is only discovered when someone examines a file closely.

How eSourcing Data helps

A duty to have regard is an evidence problem before it is a policy problem. eSourcing Data makes the consideration an explicit, dated step in the procurement workflow, so the record of how the current policy objectives were taken into account is created at the moment the decisions are made rather than assembled retrospectively.

Because templates and workflows are managed centrally in the platform, an organisation can update its materials once when a new statement is published and have the change flow through to new procurements, rather than relying on individual officers to notice. That directly addresses the timing element of the duty, which is where most organisations are exposed.

Portfolio reporting closes the loop. Commercial leads and internal audit can see across all activity where policy considerations have been recorded, which procurements skipped the step, and where the same template wording has been repeated without procurement specific reasoning. That turns a duty spread across many individual files into something an organisation can actually assure.

What to do about it

1. 1Confirm which NPPS is current before each procurement begins, and record the version relied on.
2. 2Assign ownership for monitoring changes to the NPPS and updating procurement templates when a new statement is published.
3. 3Add an explicit policy objectives consideration step at the procurement strategy stage.
4. 4Record what each relevant objective means for the specific procurement rather than repeating generic wording.
5. 5Document the reasoning where an objective was given limited weight in the circumstances.
6. 6Agree and record a position on which statement applies to procurements running across a change of NPPS.
7. 7Sample completed files periodically to confirm the duty is being evidenced substantively.