Procurement reform in practice: what public bodies should prioritise first

The Procurement Act 2023 has been in force since 24 February 2025. Most contracting authorities have completed the training. Rather fewer have finished the harder work of changing how they actually behave.

The gap between knowing the rules and running to them

Almost every authority I speak to has been through the Cabinet Office learning modules. Officers can describe the new procedural routes, and they know the old regulations have gone. What has proved harder is the second stage, where the reformed regime has to be reflected in standing orders, contract procedure rules, delegation schemes, forward planning and the day to day habits of commissioning teams.

That gap is where the risk sits. A regime can be perfectly well understood in the abstract and still produce non-compliant behaviour, because the internal machinery has not caught up. Below are the four areas where, in my view, effort repays itself fastest.

One. Contract procedure rules and the scheme of delegation

Contract procedure rules written against the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 will still contain terminology and thresholds that no longer map onto the statutory scheme. Left unamended they create a peculiar exposure, because an officer who follows the authority's own rules to the letter may nonetheless be departing from the Act.

The review needs to go further than a search and replace exercise on regulation numbers. Competitive flexible procedure design, the treatment of below-threshold contracts, the internal authority required to exclude a supplier, and who signs off a direct award justification are all decisions the Act leaves to the authority. If your rules are silent, the decision will be taken informally by whoever is closest to the procurement, and that is precisely the sort of arrangement which reads badly in an audit report.

Two. Transparency notices are an operational problem, not a legal one

The volume of notices required across the contract lifecycle is the single largest practical change for most authorities. Pipeline notices, transparency notices for direct awards, contract change notices and contract performance information all have to be published, and published on time.

The legal analysis here is usually straightforward. The failure mode is almost always operational: nobody owns the calendar. Where an authority has a central procurement team, ownership can be assigned quickly. Where procurement is devolved to service departments, the notices tend to be produced by whoever remembers, which is a system that works well until it does not.

A publication obligation with no named owner is not a control. It is an assumption.

The fix is dull and effective. Map every notice obligation against the contracts on your forward plan, name an individual responsible for each, and put publication on the same reporting line as any other statutory return.

Three. Exclusions and the debarment regime

The exclusion grounds under the Act, and the central debarment list which sits behind them, require authorities to make judgments they were not previously asked to make. Self-cleaning assessments in particular involve an evaluative decision about whether a supplier has genuinely addressed the circumstances giving rise to an exclusion ground.

Those decisions attract challenge. They are also frequently taken under time pressure, by evaluation panels whose members have no particular experience of writing reasons that will withstand scrutiny. Authorities should decide now, in the calm, what their process looks like: who assesses, on what evidence, against what framework, and how the reasoning is recorded. Constructing that process during a live procurement, with a disappointed bidder's solicitors already in correspondence, is considerably less comfortable.

Four. Assessment summaries and the discipline of writing reasons

The requirement to provide assessment summaries to unsuccessful suppliers has changed the character of evaluation records. What was once an internal document, written for colleagues, is now something the recipient will read closely and may forward to advisers.

Evaluators need to understand that shift. Scores must be traceable to the published criteria, comments must explain the score rather than merely restate it, and the panel's reasoning must be consistent across bidders. Where an authority still records evaluation in free text boxes with no moderation trail, that is worth correcting before the next significant competition rather than after it.

What good looks like from here

• Contract procedure rules and delegations reviewed against the Act, with the gaps identified and a date for member approval
• A notice calendar tied to the forward plan, with named owners and a reporting route when publication slips
• A written exclusion and self-cleaning assessment process, agreed before it is needed
• Evaluation and moderation templates that produce assessment summaries capable of being sent out unamended
• A short annual assurance report to the audit committee covering all of the above

None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a regime that is understood and a regime that is actually being followed.