The Procurement Act 2023 came into force in February 2025. It's the biggest overhaul of UK public procurement law in thirty years — and most design agencies haven't fully registered what it changes.
Some of those changes are administrative. Others directly affect how public sector buyers announce work, how long you have to respond, and how early you can start building a relationship with the right commissioners. If you're running BD for a design or digital agency, this is worth understanding properly.
Here's what's actually different, and what it means for how you find and win public sector contracts.
Why the Act Happened
UK public procurement law was inherited from EU directives. After Brexit, the government had the option to rewrite the rules from scratch. The Procurement Act 2023 is the result — a single consolidated framework replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, the Utilities Contracts Regulations 2016, and a handful of other instruments that had accumulated over decades.
The stated goals: more transparency, more competition from SMEs, less bureaucracy. For agencies, the transparency elements are the most immediately useful.
What's Changed: The Six Things That Matter Most to Agencies
1. Find a Tender Service replaces OJEU for above-threshold contracts
Contracts above the threshold for central government (currently £213,477 for most services) must now be published on Find a Tender Service (FTS) — gov.uk/find-a-tender. Contracts Finder remains active for below-threshold contracts.
In practice, this means you now need to monitor two platforms instead of one. FTS handles the higher-value work. Contracts Finder handles the rest. The split is real and consequential: a £250k digital transformation contract will appear on FTS and not Contracts Finder. If you're only watching one platform, you're already missing a category of work.
Most agencies are watching neither consistently.
2. New notice types give earlier sight of upcoming work
This is the most underused change in the Act. Three new notice types now exist:
Pipeline notices (formerly "PME notices" — Preliminary Market Engagement): Buyers must publish a pipeline notice for any contract they intend to procure with a value above £2 million. These notices appear 40+ days before the contract is formally advertised. They describe the upcoming requirement in broad terms — enough for you to decide whether to invest relationship-building time.
Planned procurement notices: For smaller or framework-based work, buyers can publish a planned procurement notice flagging that a competitive process is coming. These notices also allow the standstill period to be shortened from 30 to 10 days — a useful mechanism for buyers who want to move faster.
Transparency notices: When a buyer awards a contract without competition (direct award), they must publish a transparency notice. This tells the market a contract has been awarded and to whom. Useful intelligence — if a competitor has just won a direct-award contract with a council, you know to start positioning for when it comes back to market.
The upshot: there is more advance notice available now than ever before. The problem is knowing where to look and doing it consistently.
3. Competitive flexible procedure
Under the old rules, buyers had to follow one of a small number of prescribed procurement routes: open procedure, restricted procedure, competitive dialogue, and so on. The Act introduces a new "competitive flexible procedure" that gives buyers considerably more latitude to design the process.
In practice, this means processes will vary more. One buyer might run a two-stage written selection process. Another might invite three agencies for a paid design sprint. The lack of standardisation makes the pre-procurement relationship more important — buyers who know you before they run the process are more likely to design a process you can reasonably compete in.
This is another reason why pipeline notices matter. If you know a procurement is coming 40+ days in advance, you have time to reach out to the commissioner, understand the brief informally, and position your experience before the formal competition begins.
4. A central supplier debarment register
The Act created a new UK central debarment register — a list of suppliers who cannot bid for public contracts due to mandatory or discretionary exclusion grounds.
For most design agencies, this is background noise. The exclusion grounds are serious (fraud, bribery, modern slavery, serious financial failure). You're unlikely to be on it.
But it matters in one indirect way: buyers are now required to check the register before awarding contracts. The due diligence process is more systematic than before. If you've had any historical issues with public sector clients — disputes, contract terminations, late delivery — it's worth understanding the grounds and making sure your house is in order before you invest in a competitive bid.
5. Standstill periods and faster awards
The mandatory standstill period — the time between notification of award decision and contract signature, during which unsuccessful bidders can challenge — has been reduced in some circumstances. With a planned procurement notice in place, the standstill can be as short as 10 days rather than 30.
For agencies: this means the window to challenge an unfair process is shorter when a planned procurement notice has been published. If you believe a process was run improperly, move quickly.
More practically: faster standstills mean faster contract starts. If you win, you might be expected to mobilise sooner than under the old rules.
6. Social value and transparency requirements tightened
The Act doesn't change the Social Value Act 2012, but it reinforces the expectation that social value will be assessed in central government procurements, and requires buyers to document how they've weighted it. For agencies tendering for government digital and design contracts, this means a social value statement is increasingly a serious component of your bid — not a checkbox.
The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) language has also tightened. If your agency doesn't have clear policies on environmental impact, supplier ethics, and workforce practices, you'll struggle to score well on tenders that use these criteria.
What This Means for Your BD Practice
Three practical shifts:
First, monitor FTS as well as Contracts Finder. The split between the two platforms is now real. High-value design and digital work is moving to FTS. If your team is manually checking Contracts Finder once a week and calling it done, you're missing the most commercially significant contracts.
Second, start tracking pipeline notices. These are the most valuable signal in the new framework. A pipeline notice at £2M+ means a significant contract is coming. If you see one for a buyer you understand — NHS trust, government department, local authority — you have 40+ days to make contact before the formal tender is live. That's relationship-building time. Most agencies aren't using it.
Third, invest in your social value position before you need it. If you tender for central government work and haven't thought about your social value proposition, you're behind. It doesn't need to be elaborate — a clear statement about how your agency creates local employment, supports diverse hiring, or reduces environmental impact in your delivery model is usually enough. But it needs to exist before you submit, not be improvised in a tender response.
The Monitoring Problem Hasn't Gone Away — It's Got Harder
The Procurement Act 2023 is broadly positive for SMEs and design agencies. More transparency, earlier signals, more flexibility in how procurements are run.
But it's added complexity to the monitoring task. You now have:
- FTS for above-threshold contracts
- Contracts Finder for below-threshold
- Pipeline notices on FTS, 40+ days before formal tender
- Planned procurement notices — separate from pipeline notices, different threshold
- Transparency notices for direct awards — competitive intelligence
- Framework call-offs on Crown Commercial Service, NHS frameworks, and dozens of sector-specific ones
No single manual search covers all of this. The agencies that will benefit most from the Act's transparency requirements are the ones with a systematic process for catching signals across all these surfaces — not just the ones who check a portal once a week and hope for the best.
Tandara monitors these sources daily and filters for contracts relevant to design and digital agencies. If you want to see what's currently live without setting up your own monitoring system, there's a free 14-day trial — no card required.
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