Quick answer: The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025, replacing the patchwork of EU-derived regulations that most of us have worked under for the past decade. For buyers, the headline changes are not just procedural — they directly affect how you attract, assess, and develop your supplier market from the moment you run your next procurement.
This Is Not a Minor Update
I have sat through enough procurement reform announcements to be sceptical when someone tells me everything is about to change. Usually, it is not. This time, I would argue it genuinely is — at least in terms of the framework you are operating within. The question is whether your supplier market is ready for what you are now legally required to do differently, and whether you have done enough to prepare them.
Let me be direct about the practical implications.
The Procurement Pipeline: You Now Have to Publish One
From day one, contracting authorities above the relevant thresholds are required to publish a pipeline of planned procurements on the new Find a Tender service. This is not optional, and it is not simply good practice that some organisations choose to do. It is a legal requirement.
For your supplier market, this matters enormously. Smaller suppliers — the ones who cannot afford business development teams monitoring the market full-time — now have a genuine, consistent window into what you are planning to buy and when. If your pipeline is poorly populated or vague, you are already failing to support the market access that the Act is designed to create.
Get your pipeline published, keep it current, and make it useful. A list of contract titles and approximate values tells a supplier something. A list of contract titles with no dates, no scope context, and no contact point tells them almost nothing.
Preliminary Market Engagement Is Now Explicitly Encouraged
The Act gives explicit statutory footing to preliminary market engagement — the practice of talking to suppliers before you go to market. Previously, buyers often avoided this for fear of accusations of favouritism or compromising a future process. The Act clarifies the rules: engage early, document what you did and why, publish a summary, and ensure no supplier is unfairly advantaged.
This is good news for buyers who have always known that understanding your supply market before you write a specification produces better procurements. It is also good news for suppliers, who can now engage with you without either party nervously looking over their shoulder.
The practical implication: build preliminary market engagement into your procurement timetables as a standard step, not an afterthought.
The Exclusions Regime Has Been Overhauled
The old mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds have been replaced with a new framework, including a central debarment list maintained by the Cabinet Office. Suppliers on that list can be excluded automatically.
For buyers managing supplier development programmes, this has real implications. Suppliers you are actively developing need to understand what the exclusion grounds are — including the new discretionary grounds around poor performance on previous public contracts. Underperformance is now a more formal risk for suppliers than it was before.
If you run supplier development activity, make sure your suppliers know this. It is a conversation worth having directly, not one you should assume they are picking up from the guidance documents.
Transparency Obligations Increase Significantly
The Act substantially increases the number of notices you are required to publish and the information they must contain. Contract award notices, contract performance notices, contract termination notices — the list is longer and the requirements are more specific than before.
For your supplier market, this transparency cuts both ways. Your suppliers will be able to see more about how you manage contracts and how you treat incumbent suppliers. That is healthy. It also means the standard of your contract management practice is, in effect, more visible than it used to be.
If your contract management is not particularly strong, now is a good time to address that — both for compliance reasons and because your supplier market will increasingly be making decisions about whether to bid for your work based on your reputation as a buyer.
The Buyer–Supplier Relationship Has Shifted
The Act introduces a new overarching objective: delivering value for money, maximising public benefit, sharing information to help suppliers, and acting with integrity. That last phrase — acting with integrity — has been elevated from implicit expectation to statutory principle.
In practice, this means treating your supplier market fairly is no longer just sensible procurement practice. It is part of your legal framework.
The Practical Takeaway
Audit what you have published on Find a Tender in the last thirty days. Check your pipeline is live and meaningful. Book time with your category leads to plan preliminary market engagement into the next three procurements on your list. And if you run a supplier development programme, update your suppliers on the new exclusion grounds before your next session. Day one has passed. The clock is running.