The Procurement Act 2023 for suppliers: what changed, and what to do now

The Act does not change what wins a public contract: a credible offer, well evidenced, at a price the buyer can defend. It changes the plumbing around it — where opportunities are published, how your company identity travels from bid to bid, what the buyer must tell you after the decision, and how quickly you must be paid. Suppliers who learn the plumbing early waste less time on admin and get more out of each loss.

Where the Act applies (and where it does not)

The Act covers contracting authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland kept its own regime under the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 and the Scottish regulations: the 2023 Act only reaches a limited set of bodies there, such as cross-border bodies and those with reserved functions. If you bid in Scotland, keep using Public Contracts Scotland and the Scottish rules.

Procurements that were already running on 24 February 2025 continue under the old rules until they end, and so do contracts awarded under them. During the transition you may therefore see both regimes side by side — check which law a tender notice cites before assuming anything about timelines or debriefs.

Step one: register on the Central Digital Platform

The Central Digital Platform (CDP) is the government's single site for procurement notices and supplier information. It runs on Find a Tender, which already published above-threshold opportunities before the Act. Under the new regime, buyers must publish their notices there, and suppliers are expected to hold a registration before they take part in a covered procurement.

1. 1
   Create an account

   Sign in to Find a Tender with a GOV.UK One Login and create an organisation record for your company.

2. 2
   Get your PPON

   Registration issues a Public Procurement Organisation Number (PPON) — your unique identifier across every procurement on the platform.

3. 3
   Fill in your core information once

   Legal name, registered address, company number, connected persons, legal form, and the declarations about exclusion grounds.

4. 4
   Share it with each buyer

   When you bid, you share your stored supplier information with the buyer instead of retyping it into a questionnaire.

5. 5
   Keep it current

   Information must be kept up to date. Reconfirm it whenever something changes, and in any case before you share it for a new procurement.

Many buyers still run their tenders on their own e-tendering portal (Delta, Proactis, Atamis, In-Tend and others). The CDP does not replace those portals: you will usually need both — the CDP for your identity and the notices, the buyer's portal for the actual documents and submission.

Most advantageous tender: what the new award test means

Under the old rules, contracts went to the most economically advantageous tender (MEAT). The Act replaces it with the most advantageous tender (MAT). The word "economically" was dropped on purpose: it signals that buyers can and should weigh more than cost — quality, social value, environmental performance, delivery risk — as long as the criteria relate to the subject matter of the contract and are set out in advance.

In practice, MAT does not mean price stops mattering. It means you cannot assume it is the only lever. Read the published criteria and their weightings as the buyer's own description of what a good offer looks like, and answer them in that order. The logic is the same as in any scored evaluation; our guide to how proposals are evaluated walks through it from the evaluator's chair.

Two competitive procedures instead of five

The Act replaces the old menu (open, restricted, competitive dialogue, competitive procedure with negotiation, innovation partnership) with two competitive procedures:

• The open procedure — a single stage. Anyone can submit a tender, and the buyer evaluates against the published criteria. It behaves much like the old open procedure.
• The competitive flexible procedure — the buyer designs its own process: a selection stage, rounds of negotiation, dialogue, demonstrations, site visits, or a mix. The design must be described in the tender notice or the associated documents.

The competitive flexible procedure is where suppliers need to read most carefully. Two buyers can run it in completely different ways. Before you commit, note: how many stages there are, whether a shortlist is drawn after the first one, when negotiation happens, and whether the buyer reserves the right to award on initial tenders without negotiating at all. That last point decides whether you can treat your first submission as a draft — usually you cannot.

Flexible for the buyer means unpredictable for the supplier — unless you read the process description before you read the specification.

Notices worth watching

The Act multiplies transparency notices across the life of a contract. For a supplier looking for work, three are worth setting alerts for on Find a Tender:

1. Pipeline notices — larger buyers publish their planned procurements for the coming period. This is the earliest signal you will get.
2. Preliminary market engagement notices — the buyer is talking to the market before writing the specification. Taking part is how you shape requirements instead of reacting to them.
3. Tender notices — the formal start of a procurement.

Contract award, contract details and contract change notices also matter, but mostly for market intelligence: who won, at what value, and when the contract will come back to market. Monitoring all of this by hand across several sources is exactly the work Kodalyn automates — see our tender monitoring.

The assessment summary: use every one you get

Before a buyer enters into a contract, it must send an assessment summary to every supplier that submitted an assessed tender. It explains how your tender was scored against the award criteria and, for unsuccessful bidders, how it compared with the most advantageous tender. The standstill period runs from the contract award notice that follows, which gives you a window to raise concerns before the contract is signed.

Treat each summary as free consulting. File it with your bid, note the criterion where you lost the most points, and change that section of your standard answers before the next tender. Suppliers who do this systematically improve faster than those who simply bid more often.

30-day payment terms, down the supply chain

The Act implies payment terms into public contracts: undisputed, valid invoices must be paid within 30 days (section 68), and equivalent terms are implied into the subcontracts that sit underneath a public contract (section 73). Any clause that tries to override them has no effect. Larger contracting authorities must also publish payments compliance notices reporting how quickly they actually pay.

For an SME working as a subcontractor, this is significant: your 30-day right does not depend on what your prime contractor negotiated. Make sure your invoices contain everything the contract requires to be "valid" — a rejected invoice resets the clock.

Exclusions and the debarment list

The Act sets out mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds — from fraud and corruption to serious breaches of contract and failures to pay tax. Buyers must consider them for your company and for connected persons, and they can look at your intended subcontractors too. A ground does not apply automatically if you can show the circumstances are unlikely to recur: evidence of self-cleaning (remediation, new controls, staff changes) matters.

Section 62 creates a debarment list, kept by a Minister of the Crown, of suppliers investigated and found to be excluded or excludable. Buyers must check it. A supplier is notified before being added and can apply to be removed. For most honest companies the practical takeaway is simple: keep your exclusion declarations on the CDP accurate, and if something has gone wrong in the past, document what you changed.

What the Act does for SMEs

• Buyers must have regard to the barriers SMEs face and consider whether the contract could be split into lots — and explain if they choose not to.
• Financial standing requirements should be proportionate: a buyer cannot ask for audited accounts from a supplier that is not legally required to produce them.
• A single registration on the CDP cuts the repetitive admin that used to deter small firms from bidding at all.
• Prompt payment rights travel down the supply chain, which makes subcontracting to a prime a more viable way into the market.

None of this guarantees a win, but it lowers the cost of trying. For a small team, that cost is mostly time spent writing. Kodalyn drafts the response from your own evidence, tied to each published criterion, so the hours go into review rather than a blank page — see AI drafting.

A one-week checklist

Official references: the Procurement Act 2023 on legislation.gov.uk, the Cabinet Office Procurement Act 2023 guidance documents, and Find a Tender. Where this guide and the official text differ, the official text wins.