Guide

The Procurement Act 2023: what actually changed for suppliers

In force since 24 February 2025, replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Most coverage was written for buyers. This is the supplier's side.

Current to September 2026 · sources listed at the end

Assessment summaries — the change SMEs use least

Where a competitive tendering procedure has been run, the contracting authority must give each assessed supplier an assessment summary: information about the authority's assessment of that supplier's tender, and, where different, of the most advantageous tender.

In plain terms, you are entitled to know how you scored and how the winner scored.

Read every assessment summary you receive, including for bids you won. It is the only free, buyer-authored feedback you will ever get on your answer library, and it tells you exactly which questions are dragging your average down.

Assessment summaries are not required for bids excluded or disqualified before the assessment stage — another reason compliance failures are so expensive: you lose the contract and the feedback.

Two procedures, and one of them is whatever the buyer designs

The Act provides the open procedure — a single-stage competitive tender — and the competitive flexible procedure, which the buyer designs themselves. The second is the significant one. Buyers can now build multi-stage processes with negotiation, demonstrations, dialogue and down-selection in whatever shape suits the contract.

You can no longer infer the process from the procedure name. The buyer must describe the procedure they have designed, and that description is the rulebook. Read it before you read anything else.

Conditions of participation replace the old selection stage

Buyers now set conditions of participation, which must be proportionate and genuinely related to your ability to perform the contract.

That proportionality requirement is useful to smaller suppliers. If a condition looks disproportionate for the contract's size or risk — a turnover threshold far above the contract value, an accreditation irrelevant to the work — that is a legitimate clarification question. Asking it politely and early is often how a smaller supplier gets a barrier removed, for themselves and everyone else.

The Central Digital Platform

Suppliers register once on the enhanced Find a Tender service and store core business information for reuse across bids. Registration is free, and existing Find a Tender users had to re-register.

You will need: your Companies House number, registered address and website, the last two years of accounts, details of connected persons with significant control, and disclosure of any relevant convictions or offences.

Register before you need to. Suppliers routinely discover on deadline day that the connected-persons information requires a director who is on holiday.

Standstill: eight working days, and the clock starts immediately

The mandatory standstill period is eight working days beginning with the day the contract award notice is published, subject to exemptions including frameworks, dynamic markets, light touch contracts and certain direct awards.

If you intend to challenge an award, that window is short and it starts at publication — not when you get round to reading the notice.

Published KPIs and performance ratings

For public contracts with an estimated value over £5 million, the buyer must set at least three KPIs and publish an assessment of the supplier's performance against them at least annually. Poor performance can be published through a contract performance notice.

This changes how you should write. What you promise in a bid can become a published performance measure. Over-promising is no longer only a delivery risk — a published poor-performance rating is visible to every other buyer considering you. Promise what you will deliver in a bad year, not a good one.

Exclusions and debarment

The Act created a central debarment list and a Procurement Review Unit, comprising the Public Procurement Review Service, the Procurement Compliance Service and the Debarment Review Service.

Practical consequence: check your subcontractors and consortium partners against the debarment list before you name them in a bid. Their status can disqualify you.

Prompt payment through the supply chain

The Act strengthens payment provisions, extending the benefit of 30-day payment terms across a broader range of public contracts and through the supply chain.

Worth using in bids. If you pay your own suppliers faster than the requirement, say so with the actual number — it is evidence for supply chain questions and for Social Value Outcome 3, and most competitors leave it out.

What to do about it, in order

  1. Register on the Central Digital Platform, before you need it.
  2. Request and read your assessment summaries. Rewrite your two worst-scoring answers after every result.
  3. Audit your answer library for pre-2025 references — PCR 2015, OJEU, the old Social Value themes.
  4. Check partners against the debarment list before naming them.
  5. Review anything you routinely promise in bids, and ask whether you would be comfortable seeing it published as a performance rating in year three.

Go deeper

What the Act changed about your answers

Bid Ready covers what the Act means question by question — how KPI publication should change what you commit to, how to use assessment summaries to raise your average score, and response frameworks for the eighteen questions that recur in nearly every tender.

See what's inside — £99

Sources