The UK is entering a new procurement era where what happens before and after tender publication matters as much as publishing it. The Procurement Act 2023 does not simply update the rules. It changes how public buyers must operate, document decisions, and report outcomes. 

In this environment, a procurement platform cannot be a thin layer to publish tender notices and collect bids. It needs to be the source of truth that connects planning, tender design, evaluation, award rationale, and post award performance into one auditable and consistent process.

Since the Act came into force on 24 February 2025, the National Procurement Policy Statement (NPPS), and the Sourcing Playbook, have become even more central to how teams define value and demonstrate good practice. 

Buyers must have regard to the NPPS and they are expected to execute Playbook methodology consistently. Legacy tendering tools create risk because they leave too much work outside the platform, forcing teams into manual workarounds that increase errors, reduce transparency, and make compliance harder to prove.

 

The real change is end to end accountability

What has changed is not just the legislation, but the way procurement has to run. Teams now need a continuous thread from planning and market engagement through tender design and evaluation, then into award documentation, contract management, and performance reporting. 

If your platform only supports the tender stage, you are forced to stitch the rest together manually. That is when information gets duplicated, approvals get buried and evidence becomes difficult to retrieve when you need it.

 

1.The transparency explosion and the Central Digital Platform dependency

Transparency obligations have grown quickly. There are more notice types, and planning is moving closer to publication. At the same time, publication must flow through Find a Tender within the Central Digital Platform. That puts pressure on structured, accurate data and reliable integration. If your procurement platform cannot capture the right information in the right format, teams end up patching the gaps by hand. Things still get published, but the risk stays with the organisation.

 

2. Designing your own procedure means documenting every step

The Competitive Flexible Procedure gives authorities more freedom to shape multi stage processes, but it also raises the bar for integrity and defensibility. Flexibility only works when every step is documented consistently and the rationale can be audited. Platforms that focus on publishing and bid collection struggle to support this level of workflow control and evidence capture, which is why teams end up rebuilding records after the fact.

 

3. When value expands and the NPPS now shapes your scoring model

As “value” becomes broader than price, evaluation has to do more than produce a score. Authorities may weigh outcomes such as social value, innovation and wider supplier participation, and the National Procurement Policy Statement sets priorities they must have regard to. That makes it essential to show, in a simple and traceable way, how those priorities were turned into criteria, how evidence was assessed, and why the final award decision was made. When criteria, evidence and scoring sit across separate documents and spreadsheets, that story becomes harder to tell and harder to defend

 

5. Contract management becomes a compliance requirement

For contracts over five million pounds, Section 52 introduces mandatory KPIs, annual performance assessment, and public reporting through a UK9 Contract Performance Notice on Find a Tender. 

That moves contract management from best practice to compliance requirement. If KPIs, reviews and evidence sit outside the platform, reporting becomes reactive and inconsistent. You also lose the continuous supplier record that helps you make better decisions in future procurements.

 

The Sourcing Playbook is now a platform requirement

The Sourcing Playbook matters more, not less. It remains the UK government’s practical methodology for running procurement well, and the Procurement Act reinforces that direction rather than replacing it. In practice, this raises the bar for platforms too, especially after award: KPIs are no longer optional for larger contracts, and supplier risk needs to be managed continuously, using performance evidence and outcomes that can be tracked, reviewed, and reported from one central system.

Connecting planning to tender creation

The Playbook recommended publishing pipelines so suppliers, especially small and medium sized businesses, can see what tenders are coming and prepare. The Act now makes pipeline publication a statutory requirement for larger public buyers. To meet that obligation efficiently, procurement needs planning capabilities that capture pipeline information in a structured way and can feed directly into tender creation and notice publication.

The Playbook also recommended robust, evidence based analysis and should cost models for complex projects. As value is assessed more broadly than price alone, that analysis becomes even more important because decisions need to be clearly justified. This creates a need for templates, guidance and structured data capture that move work out of static files and into a digital workflow that is auditable and repeatable.

What every procurement platform must now support

Tender publishing is no longer the finish line. Public buyers need to demonstrate how decisions were made, and they need to report what happens after award. That means a procurement platform must support the full lifecycle, not just the tender stage, and it must do it in a way that reduces manual work, strengthens auditability, and keeps data consistent from start to finish.

This is why many public buyers are reassessing what they have today. If key steps happen outside the system, the organisation inherits risk. Every spreadsheet used to rebuild an audit trail, every email chain used to confirm approvals, and every manual re entry of notice data increases the chance of inconsistency. Under the Procurement Act 2023, that inconsistency is no longer a minor operational issue. It can become a transparency issue, a challenge risk, or a failure to meet mandatory reporting obligations.

To help teams navigate this shift, we have created a Buyer’s Guide that highlights what to look for in a platform as requirements evolve. It covers the practical impact of increased transparency and publishing through Find a Tender as part of the Central Digital Platform, and it outlines the capabilities that support more controlled, auditable processes, including flexible procedures.