For a supplier, not a lawyer
What the Procurement Act 2023 means for a small supplier
The rules changed on 24 February 2025, and the mechanics of finding public work changed with them. Here's what is settled, what is still arriving, and where to check it yourself.
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The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025. On that date, an enhanced Find a Tender service launched as the central digital platform for public procurement, which is where opportunities are published and where suppliers register their details. Not every provision of the Act was switched on that day, and further regulations have continued to commence through 2026.
One place to register, one place to look
The central digital platform stores a supplier's core business details so they can be used for more than one bid. That is the practical change for a small supplier: the details you used to retype into every portal now live in one place.
It also makes public procurement opportunities visible and easier to search at no cost. If you've been paying for a feed to find work you could have found free, that's worth an hour of somebody's afternoon to test.
The rules are still arriving
The Act itself says so. Section 127(2) provides that the remaining provisions come into force on such day as a Minister of the Crown may by regulations appoint, and that different days may be appointed for different purposes.
So the position on a given point can be different this quarter from last, and a page like this one goes stale.
A live example from this year: the Procurement Act 2023 (Specified International Agreements and Saving Provision) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 came into force on 30 March 2026. The government's own guidance collection has kept moving with it. Further guidance is scheduled for 15 April 2026 and 13 July 2026. The central digital platform factsheet carries an update date of 23 June 2026.
What has not changed is how you win
The route to the opportunity changed. The way a bid is marked did not.
A buyer still names the criteria, weights them, and scores each answer against its own criterion. Your evidence still has to be specific to the contract in front of you, and your pricing schedule still has to agree with your written answers. A supplier who reads the new platform brilliantly and writes generic answers is in exactly the position they were in before.
The detail of how a bid is marked is on its own page, and the answers themselves are what tender writing for companies covers.
What to do about it this month
- Register your organisation's core details on the central digital platform once, properly, so the next bid starts from something rather than from nothing.
- Search Find a Tender for the things you actually deliver, and save the searches.
- Get your mandatory documents current, because the pass-or-fail requirements are usually accounts, insurance levels, references and policies, and no amount of writing fixes a missing one. The compliance list has them in order.
- Check the government's own guidance collection before you rely on anything you read anywhere, including here.
Check it yourself, and here is where
Two pages carry the official position. The transforming public procurement collection holds the commencement date and the overview. The short guides, including the central digital platform factsheet, hold the detail and their own update dates.
This page names its sources on purpose. Anything about procurement law that doesn't tell you where it came from is worth less than the ten minutes it takes to check.
Found one on the platform that fits?
Send the notice with your deadline and the fee for answering it comes back before you commit.
You hear back within 24 hours. If you send a deadline, you hear inside one working day whether we can meet it, and that comes before you pay anything.