The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025, and the conversation around it has been, almost entirely, a supplier's conversation. The Act simplifies the bidding process. It reduces barriers to entry for smaller suppliers. It introduces the Most Advantageous Tender to allow wider value considerations. It creates new transparency through the Central Digital Platform. Suppliers have been told, repeatedly, that the Act makes the market more open and more accessible to them.
Most of this is true. It is also beside the point. The supplier-facing changes are real but secondary. The structural significance of the Procurement Act lies in what it does to contracting authorities, and specifically in the information obligations it imposes on the buyers of public goods and services. The Act creates a disclosure architecture that most CNI buyers are not prepared for, and the organisations that have read the Act as a supplier-side reform have largely missed the part of it that will actually cause them difficulty.
The Supplier Story
It is worth being clear about what the Act does change on the supplier side, because the changes are genuine and the supplier conversation is not wrong, merely incomplete.
The Act consolidates the previous patchwork of procurement regulation into a single framework. It replaces the Most Economically Advantageous Tender with the Most Advantageous Tender, allowing contracting authorities to weight factors beyond narrow cost, including social value, quality, and strategic considerations. It introduces new procedures intended to be more flexible than the rigid processes they replace. It creates the Central Digital Platform as a single point for supplier registration and procurement transparency. It strengthens provisions around prompt payment and introduces a new exclusions and debarment regime.
For suppliers, the headline is access. The Act is designed, in part, to make public procurement more open to a wider range of suppliers, particularly smaller firms that found the previous regime's complexity and cost prohibitive. This is a real policy intent and the Act genuinely advances it.
But access is a supplier's concern. The Act's deeper architecture is about something else, and that something else lands on the buyer.
The Disclosure Architecture
The Procurement Act builds an unprecedented transparency regime around the entire procurement lifecycle, and the obligations of that regime fall predominantly on contracting authorities.
Under the Act, contracting authorities must publish a series of notices across the procurement lifecycle that, taken together, create a far more complete public record of how public bodies buy than has ever previously existed. Planned procurement notices signalling upcoming activity. Tender notices. Award notices with expanded content. Contract details for higher-value awards. Contract performance information, including against published key performance indicators. Notices of contract changes and terminations. The Central Digital Platform aggregates this into a searchable, structured, public record.
The effect is to make the contracting authority's procurement behaviour visible in a way it has never been before. Not just the award, but the planning, the process, the performance, and the changes. A contracting authority's entire procurement conduct becomes a matter of public record, structured for analysis, available to suppliers, competitors, journalists, researchers, and anyone else who cares to look.
This is the structural change. The Act does not merely open the market to more suppliers. It opens the contracting authority to scrutiny of a depth and granularity that the previous regime never imposed. And most contracting authorities, including most CNI buyers, have prepared for the Act as though it were a process change to their bidding procedures, rather than a transparency regime that exposes their procurement conduct to systematic external examination.
Why This Is Hard for CNI Buyers
The disclosure architecture creates specific difficulties for CNI buyers that the supplier-focused conversation has not addressed.
The first is the performance disclosure obligation. The Act requires contracting authorities to set and publish key performance indicators for higher-value contracts and to report performance against them. This is straightforward in principle and exposing in practice. A contracting authority that publishes KPIs and then reports poor performance against them has created a public record of a procurement that did not deliver. A contracting authority that sets undemanding KPIs to avoid this exposure has created a different problem, a public record that invites the question of why the KPIs were so weak. The performance disclosure obligation forces a transparency about procurement outcomes that many CNI buyers have never had to manage, and managing it well requires capability that procurement functions built under the old regime do not necessarily have.
The second is the consistency exposure. When a contracting authority's entire procurement conduct becomes a structured public record, inconsistencies become visible. Why was this supplier selected here and a different approach taken there? Why did this contract change so substantially after award? Why does the performance reporting on this contract differ so much from the projections in the award notice? Under the old regime, these questions were difficult to ask because the information was fragmented and hard to assemble. Under the Act, the information is aggregated and structured, and the questions become easy to ask and difficult to avoid. CNI buyers whose procurement decisions were defensible individually but inconsistent in aggregate are newly exposed.
The third is the challenge environment. The Act's transparency provisions, combined with its procedural requirements, create a richer environment for procurement challenges. Suppliers who can see the full procurement record, including the conduct of the process and the treatment of competitors, are better equipped to identify grounds for challenge. The Act was not designed to increase challenges, but its transparency architecture provides the raw material for them, and contracting authorities whose processes do not withstand the new level of visibility are more exposed to challenge than they were.
The Capability Gap
The Procurement Act's real demand on CNI buyers is a capability they were not required to have under the previous regime: the capability to conduct procurement that withstands systematic, structured, public scrutiny across the entire lifecycle.
This is different from the capability to run a compliant procurement process, which is what the old regime required and what most procurement functions are built to deliver. A process can be compliant and still expose the organisation badly when its conduct, performance, and consistency become a public record. The Act requires not just compliant process but defensible conduct, and defensible conduct under structured public transparency is a higher standard that requires different capabilities: the discipline to set meaningful KPIs and deliver against them, the consistency to make procurement decisions that cohere across the organisation's whole portfolio, and the process integrity to withstand examination by suppliers equipped with the full record.
Most CNI buyers have not built this capability, because the supplier-focused conversation about the Act did not tell them they needed to. They have prepared their bidding procedures for the new processes. They have registered on the Central Digital Platform. They have trained their commercial teams on the Most Advantageous Tender. They have, in other words, addressed the supplier-facing changes that the conversation emphasised, and they have not addressed the buyer-facing transparency architecture that is the Act's more consequential feature.
The exposure this creates will not appear immediately. It will appear over time, as the public record accumulates, as the performance data builds, as the inconsistencies become visible, and as suppliers and others learn to read the new transparency for the questions it makes askable. The contracting authorities that prepared only for the supplier story will find, in due course, that the part of the Act they did not prepare for is the part that matters most. The Procurement Act did change the market. It changed it most, and most consequentially, for the buyers who were told it was mainly about the sellers.