What the Procurement Act 2023 means for your business
On 24 February 2025, the Procurement Act 2023 came into force across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. This is the most significant reform of public procurement law in a generation. The legislation was designed to make the public sector spending process simpler, more transparent, and more open to businesses of all sizes, including small and medium-sized enterprises.
For SMEs bidding for public sector contracts, three Procurement Act changes in particular stand out. They affect how you plan your pipeline, how your bid is scored, and what information you are legally entitled to receive when you lose. This guide explains each one in plain terms, along with the practical steps you can take to benefit.
1. Procurement pipelines are now public
What has changed
Under the old framework, contracting authorities were not required to tell the market what was coming. Opportunities appeared on Contracts Finder or Find a Tender largely when they were already live, giving businesses very little time to prepare a competitive response.
This is one of the Procurement Act 2023 key changes. Any contracting authority whose total procurement spend exceeds £100 million per year must now publish a pipeline notice at the start of each financial year. That notice must list all planned procurements worth £2 million or more, giving the market advance visibility of what is coming before it goes to tender.
This information is published on the new central digital platform, which replaced both Contracts Finder and the Find a Tender Service. The platform is free to access and provides a single place to monitor opportunities across the public sector.
What this means in practice
For businesses that are prepared, advance pipeline visibility is a significant competitive advantage. Where previously you might have had four to six weeks to respond to a tender, pipeline notices can give you twelve to eighteen months of lead time before a contract is formally advertised.
That lead time allows you to research the buyer, understand their priorities, build relationships with relevant stakeholders, develop your evidence base, and assess whether the opportunity is a genuine fit for your business. All of this work happens before the tender is published, not after.
| Action point Register on the central digital platform at find-tender.service.gov.uk and set up keyword alerts for your sector. Review published pipeline notices from relevant buyers and build a forward planning calendar based on what you find. The earlier you identify an opportunity, the more time you have to position your business effectively. |
2. Social value is now formally evaluated
What has changed
The old Public Contracts Regulations 2015 used the Most Economically Advantageous Tender, or MEAT, as the basis for evaluating bids. Following the Procurement Act 2023 changes, this has been replaced with the Most Advantageous Tender, known as MAT. The removal of the word “economically” is deliberate. It signals that price alone does not determine value, and that buyers must consider a broader range of factors when awarding contracts.
The National Procurement Policy Statement presented to Parliament on 13 February 2025 took effect with the Act on 24 February 2025. It sets three priorities. The first names you directly: authorities “should drive economic growth and strengthen supply chains by giving SMEs and VCSEs a fair chance at public contracts, creating high quality jobs and championing innovation”. The second is that they “should deliver social and economic value that supports the Government’s missions including by working in partnership across organisational boundaries”. The third is commercial capability, meaning authorities are expected to get better at running procurements and managing the contracts that come out of them.
Before you rely on any of it, check that it applies to your buyer. Section 13(9) creates the duty in a single line: “A contracting authority must have regard to the national procurement policy statement.” Section 13(10) then takes it away again. In the Act’s own words, subsection (9) does not apply “to private utilities”; nor to the award of a contract “in accordance with a framework” or “by reference to suppliers’ membership of a dynamic market”; nor “in relation to procurement under a devolved Welsh procurement arrangement or transferred Northern Ireland procurement arrangement”; nor “to a devolved Welsh authority or transferred Northern Ireland authority, except in relation to procurement under a reserved procurement arrangement”. The statement adds two more limits of its own: contracts exempt under Schedule 2 are outside it, and the social value priority does not bind the Ministry of Defence on defence and security contracts.
Read practically, that means the statement is no help to you in a framework mini-competition, in a call-off from a dynamic market, with a devolved Welsh authority or a transferred Northern Ireland authority buying under their own arrangements, or with a private utility. Between them those cover a large share of what an SME actually bids for. Where the statement does apply, and a process looks as though it shut smaller suppliers out, the first priority is the wording to put in front of the buyer. Where it does not apply, the argument has to come from the Act itself, from the published award criteria, or from the buyer’s own tender documents.
How evaluation weightings typically work
Evaluation criteria and their weightings vary by contract and by buyer, but a broad pattern has emerged across much of the public sector. Price typically accounts for between 30 and 40 per cent of the overall score on many contracts, with the remaining 60 to 70 per cent allocated to quality criteria. Those quality criteria increasingly include social value, environmental performance, and innovation, alongside traditional delivery and technical capability.
This matters for SMEs because it opens up a part of the evaluation where size is not an advantage. A large national contractor can often undercut on price through economies of scale. It is far harder for them to demonstrate authentic, place-based social impact of the kind that a local business can evidence genuinely.
What buyers mean by social value
Social value in procurement refers to the additional benefit a contract delivers to people and communities beyond the core deliverable. Common themes include local employment and apprenticeships, supply chain spend with small businesses, support for people facing barriers to work, carbon reduction commitments, and community investment. Buyers typically ask bidders to make specific, measurable commitments against these themes and to demonstrate how they have delivered similar outcomes on previous contracts.
| Action point Start capturing your social value data now, before you need it for a bid. Record local employment figures, apprenticeship numbers, payments to local supply chain businesses, and any community or charitable activity linked to your work. Buyers want specific, quantified commitments backed by evidence of past delivery. Vague statements about community benefit score poorly. Concrete data with measurable outcomes score well. |
3. You now have a legal right to feedback on losing bids
What has changed
Under the old framework, unsuccessful bidders could request a debrief, but the quality and depth of information provided was inconsistent. Some buyers provided useful feedback. Many did not. There was no legal obligation to give a meaningful account of how your bid had been scored.
Part of the key changes in the Procurement Act 2023 is the introduction of a formal mechanism called the assessment summary. When a buyer has decided to award a contract, they must notify all unsuccessful bidders and provide each of them with an assessment summary showing their scores, the scores of the winning bidder, and an explanation of how the evaluation was applied. This is a legal obligation, not a courtesy, and it applies to all above-threshold procurements.
The Act also introduces an eight-working-day mandatory standstill period between the award decision and the signing of the contract. This gives unsuccessful bidders time to review the assessment summary and, if they believe there has been a legal irregularity, to seek a legal remedy before the contract is executed.
Why this is significant
The assessment summary is one of the most underused tools available to bidding businesses. Knowing exactly where your scores fell short, how the winning bid was positioned, and which criteria made the difference is information that directly improves your next submission. Very few SMEs are yet treating this systematically as the learning resource it is.
When you lose a bid, you have invested considerable time and resource into the process. The assessment summary turns that cost into a development opportunity. Over time, businesses that use this feedback methodically build a clearer picture of where their bids are strong, where they are weak, and what buyers in their sector are genuinely looking for.
| Action point When you receive an assessment summary, do not file it away. Read it carefully alongside the original specification and your submitted response. Note the scores for each criterion, identify the gaps between your score and the winning bidder’s score, and consider what a stronger answer would have looked like. Build a running log of these reviews so that patterns become visible across multiple bids over time. |
Making the most of a changed landscape
These Procurement Act key changes have shifted the conditions under which public sector contracts are awarded. Greater transparency through pipeline notices, a broader definition of value through the MAT framework, and the legal right to receive comparative scoring information are each, in their own right, a meaningful improvement for businesses willing to engage with them properly.
The businesses that benefit most from these changes will not be those that simply respond to tenders as they appear. They will be the ones that use pipeline information to plan ahead, that build a genuine evidence base for social value and quality criteria, and that treat every lost bid as a structured learning exercise. These are habits, not one-off actions, and the businesses that develop them early will find themselves in a stronger position as the new framework becomes established practice.
JGP Consultancy Services works with SMEs to develop bid strategies, strengthen evidence bases, and improve submission quality across public sector procurement. If you would like to discuss how your business is positioned under the new Act, please get in touch.
Sources and further reading
Procurement Act 2023 (legislation.gov.uk)
National Procurement Policy Statement 2024 (Cabinet Office, GOV.UK)
Transforming Public Procurement: guidance and implementation (Cabinet Office, GOV.UK)
Find a Tender central digital platform: find-tender.service.gov.uk