One Year Of The UK Procurement Act 2023: What Suppliers Actually Need To Know
The Procurement Act 2023 has been in force for twelve months. The legal reviews are arriving, and they confirm what many suppliers suspected: the reforms have changed the process, but not yet the outcomes.
Dynamic Markets, positioned as the headline mechanism for broader supplier access, have underperformed in practice. Contracting authorities are still adapting to new notice requirements and transparency obligations. The Competitive Flexible Procedure, designed to replace five legacy procurement routes with a single adaptable mechanism, is being used in only around 20% of procurements according to Tussell’s data. For suppliers, the practical question is not whether the Act is working. It is whether their own systems are equipped to operate effectively in a procurement environment that will continue to shift.
What The Legal Reviews Actually Say
Hugh James’s first-anniversary analysis, authored by Liz Fletcher, offers the most detailed practitioner-level review published so far. The picture is measured. Transparency has increased. Scrutiny has intensified. But the Act’s more ambitious promises, including simplification, improved SME access, and faster procurement, remain works in progress.
The open procedure still dominates. Framework agreements established under the old Public Contracts Regulations 2015 remain the vehicle of choice for most contracting authorities. Open frameworks, which were designed to allow new suppliers to join during the lifetime of the arrangement, have seen limited uptake. Authorities are defaulting to familiar structures because, in a period of legislative uncertainty, familiarity carries less litigation risk.
The Competitive Flexible Procedure tells the same story. It was designed to give authorities freedom to design bespoke procurement processes. In practice, internal governance teams are reverting to the open procedure because no published judgments exist under the new Act. Nobody wants to be the first test case. Trowers and Hamlins ran a dedicated session on the practical issues keeping their clients occupied, and the themes were consistent: standstill management, notice drafting, and the challenge of assessment summaries under a regime where everything is now publicly visible.
Hugh James also flagged what appears to be the first legal challenge brought against a direct award transparency notice. A supplier raised pre-action correspondence within days of publication, scrutinising the justification wording rather than the award itself. More transparency means more scrutiny. For suppliers, this cuts both ways: there is more intelligence available, but the quality of your own submissions is under greater examination too.
What This Means For Discovery And Qualification
The new notice architecture is the Act’s most operationally demanding feature. Where the old regulations required roughly seven notice types, the new regime introduces over fifteen, spanning the entire procurement lifecycle from pre-procurement planning through contract performance and termination.
Pipeline Notices, mandatory for central government, require annual publication of planned procurements exceeding two million pounds. Below-threshold tenders must now be advertised on the Central Digital Platform for the first time. Assessment summaries published at award stage show how bidders were evaluated. KPI Assessment Notices track supplier performance on contracts above five million pounds. Payment Compliance Notices create a public record of whether contracting authorities are meeting their 30-day payment obligations under Section 70 of the Act.
For suppliers, this is a structural change in the information environment. There is significantly more data entering the public domain about who is buying what, how they are evaluating, and how incumbents are performing. Organisations that can systematically discover, filter, and act on that intelligence have an advantage. Organisations still relying on manual scanning of portal notifications and ad-hoc Go/No-Go conversations will fall behind as the volume and complexity of published information increases.
This is a qualification infrastructure problem. If you cannot efficiently identify which opportunities align with your capabilities, pricing position, and strategic priorities, you will either miss the right tenders or waste resource pursuing the wrong ones. The Act has made both risks larger.
The Reserved Contracts Question
The Act allows contracting authorities to reserve procurements to supported employment providers, where at least 30% of workers are disabled or disadvantaged persons. This replaces the equivalent provision under the old Regulation 20, but with a broader definition.
The practical implication is a procurement environment where some opportunities are open and some are reserved. Suppliers need to identify which category applies before investing response effort. In England, authorities are approaching reserved contracts conservatively, guided primarily by the Act’s text and Cabinet Office guidance. In Wales, the additional overlay of the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023 and the Well-being of Future Generations Act creates a distinctly different policy environment that may encourage broader use.
This is not a regulatory knowledge problem. Most suppliers are aware that reserved contracts exist. The operational challenge is building the discovery and qualification systems that flag reservation status early enough to inform resource allocation decisions. If your team only discovers that a procurement was reserved after they have started drafting, you have already lost time and money. The regulatory landscape is creating more complexity in opportunity assessment, and that complexity compounds when your planning process does not account for it.
Preparing For What Comes Next
The Procurement Act 2023 was designed as a comprehensive replacement, not a stepping stone. No formal second Act has been announced. But the architecture of the legislation, which relies heavily on secondary legislation and the National Procurement Policy Statement, gives the government significant scope to adjust the regime without returning to Parliament.
Multiple areas are already generating pressure for further policy development. The political appetite for using procurement to support British industry is growing, but the UK’s commitments under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement constrain explicit domestic preference above threshold. The National Procurement Policy Statement, which all contracting authorities must have regard to, is the most likely lever for sharpening social value requirements or strengthening domestic supply chain criteria. It can be updated without primary legislation.
Hugh James’s analysis notes that Dynamic Markets in England have been hampered by the inability to make below-threshold direct awards within them, reducing their perceived flexibility. If that structural limitation persists, legislative or regulatory adjustment becomes more likely. The debarment list, another headline feature, has no entries after twelve months. Whether that reflects caution or simply the time required for cases to progress remains unclear.
New contracting authorities are already entering the market under the Act, some at significant scale. Each one brings new procurement processes, new evaluation frameworks, and new competitive dynamics that suppliers need to discover and qualify against before the first ITT lands.
The organisations best positioned for whatever comes next are those treating this period as a reason to invest in structured systems rather than a reason to wait.
The Regulatory Environment Will Keep Moving
The Procurement Act 2023 was never going to resolve the underlying challenges of public procurement in a single legislative cycle. The first year has confirmed that the Act has created complexity, not simplification, at least during this transition period. Cultural change takes longer than legislative change. Confidence takes time to build. Case law will develop.
For suppliers, the implication is straightforward. The procurement environment is more transparent, more complex, and more demanding of structured internal systems than it was twelve months ago. Organisations that invest in discovery infrastructure, qualification discipline, and systematic intelligence gathering will navigate that complexity more effectively than those relying on the same reactive processes they used under the old regime. The regulatory environment will keep moving. The question is whether your tendering infrastructure moves with it.
