Guide
The Procurement Act 2023 went live on 24 February 2025 and replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for new UK procurements. This guide covers what actually changes in a construction bid — the move from MEAT to MAT, the competitive flexible procedure, published award criteria, the notice regime, and exclusion and debarment.
The Act consolidates the previous regulations into a single regime for most public contracts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland retains its own rules). For a construction contractor, six changes matter in practice:
The wording change from “economically advantageous” to “most advantageous” is small on the page and significant in evaluation rooms. It removes the pull towards lowest cost and makes it easier for an authority to weight quality, programme certainty, carbon and social value heavily — provided those weightings are published.
For bidders this means the quality submission carries more of the award than it used to on comparable works. A price that is competitive but not lowest can still win where the quality response is demonstrably stronger against the stated criteria.
The open procedure is a single-stage competition. The competitive flexible procedure lets an authority design its own process: selection rounds, dialogue, negotiation, demonstrations, site visits, or staged submissions — in whatever order suits the contract.
The process must be described in the tender notice. Read that description as carefully as the specification: it tells you how many chances you get to improve your position, whether responses can be refined after feedback, and where the real decision points sit.
Authorities must set out the award criteria, their relative importance and how tenders will be assessed. In construction ITTs this usually appears as a criteria table with weightings, a scoring scale (commonly 0–5 or 0–100), and word or page limits per answer.
Two disciplines follow. First, answer the criterion as written — mirror its language and cover every element it names, in the order it names them. Second, write to the scale: if a top mark requires method plus evidence plus contract-specific detail, an answer with method alone is capped no matter how well written it is.
This is exactly what TendersIQ automates — it reads the published criteria and scoring scale from your ITT and marks your draft against them before you submit.
The Act introduces notices across the lifecycle — planned procurement, preliminary market engagement, tender, transparency, contract award, contract details, payments, contract performance, modification and termination — published centrally.
For contracts above threshold, authorities must set at least three KPIs and publish performance against them at least annually, plus notices where a supplier breaches or underperforms. Past performance is therefore more visible and more usable in future evaluations, so commitments made in a bid have a longer public tail than before.
Mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds are consolidated in the Act, and a central debarment list can exclude a supplier across the public sector. Grounds can bite through connected persons — parent companies, directors and, in some cases, key subcontractors.
Re-check exclusion grounds for every submission rather than reusing last year’s declaration, and confirm the position of any subcontractor you intend to name as part of your delivery model.
Most new frameworks are limited to four years (eight in utilities). Open frameworks allow re-opening for new entrants during their life, and dynamic markets replace dynamic purchasing systems with a broader scope that covers works as well as goods and services.
If you bid through Pagabo, Procure Partnerships, SCF, YPO, NHS SBS or CCS, the call-off mechanics still govern the competition — but the underlying transparency and criteria rules now come from the Act.
The Procurement Act 2023 went live on 24 February 2025, replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 for new procurements. Contracts already advertised under the old regime continue to run under those rules until they end, so most contractors are working to both frameworks for a period.
MEAT (Most Economically Advantageous Tender) has been replaced by MAT (Most Advantageous Tender). The change removes the implication that price should dominate and lets contracting authorities weight quality, social value and delivery risk more openly, provided the criteria and weightings are published up front.
It is a new, largely free-form procedure that lets an authority design its own multi-stage process — dialogue rounds, demonstrations, negotiation, prototype stages — as long as the process and award criteria are set out in the tender notice. For construction it usually means more interaction before award and more emphasis on the ITT's stated methodology.
Yes. Authorities must publish award criteria, their relative importance and the assessment methodology in the tender notice or associated documents. Practically, this means a bid should be written against the published criterion wording and scoring scale rather than as a generic quality narrative.
The Act introduces a notice regime across the lifecycle — planned procurement, tender, transparency, contract award, contract details, contract performance and termination notices — all published on the Central Digital Platform. Performance against KPIs on contracts above threshold is published at least annually.
Mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds are consolidated, and a central debarment list names suppliers excluded across the public sector. Contractors should re-check exclusion grounds — including those applying to connected persons and subcontractors — before every submission.
Social value remains a scored criterion set by each authority rather than a statutory formula, but the Act's emphasis on publishing criteria and reporting KPI performance makes measurable, contract-specific commitments more important. Vague pledges are increasingly hard to score and harder to defend once performance notices are published.
TendersIQ reads your ITT, rebuilds the criteria and scoring scale, and marks your draft the way an evaluation panel would — before you submit.
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