The Procurement Act 2023

On 24 February 2025, the rules on how contracting authorities such as local authorities buy goods, services and works will be changing through the introduction of The Procurement Act 2023.

If you are a supplier of goods, services or works to the council, or hope to do so in the future, you need to know about the changes.

The Procurement Act 2023 will improve and streamline the way procurement is done and benefit prospective suppliers of all sizes, particularly small business, start-ups and social enterprises.

Key benefits for suppliers include more standardisation and streamlining of procurement processes and the introduction of a Central Digital Platform, making it easier to find and bid for contracts.

The Central Digital Platform is an online portal which will make it easier for suppliers to find and bid for contracts, and for buyers to meet their transparency commitments under the Procurement Act 2023.

The Central Digital Platform has been designed to:

• feature a simple registration and identification for both suppliers and buyers
• store suppliers' core business details that can be used for multiple bids
• enable easy management and updating of core information quickly, and shared easily between suppliers, eSenders and buyers
• make public procurement opportunities visible, making it easier to search at no cost and set up alerts for tenders of interest for suppliers
• allow for procurement noticing throughout the procurement lifecycle
• capture procurement data and eventually allow creation of dashboards to analyse that data
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Please click on this link to watch: A guide for suppliers: How to register an organisation and the first administrator in 3 easy steps

As a supplier, there are some actions you can take to get ready for the new Act:

• sign up for regular updates here
• familiarise yourselves with the Act with supplier 'Knowledge Drop' videos, which gives a broad understanding of the Procurement Act and the key changes that will come into effect in February 2024 (these include dedicated SME and VCSE videos as part of the series)
• discuss the changes with your regular customers and clients, who will now be thinking about their forward pipelines and which procurements might be undertaken using the new approaches
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To make it easy for suppliers to find this information there is a dedicated supplier information page on GOV.UK