Procurement Act 2023 – are you ready for 24 February 2025?
With less than two weeks to go until the Procurement Act 2023 comes into force, procurement teams will be hard at work updating their procurement documents and policies ready for go-live. We have rounded up a few recent updates and templates which you might consider as part of your preparation.
Government Commercial Function (GCF) templates
The GCF’s Procurement Pathway website now contains a number of templates for use in procurements under the PA 2023, including:
- Assessment summaries
- Direct award justification report
- Pre-procurement checklist
- Conflict of Interest declaration form and assessment template
- Competitive flexible procurement pack (with guidance)
- Sourcing strategy
- Contract award and recommendation report; and
- Procurement specific questionnaire
These documents act as a starting point only and will require varying amounts of input to produce functional documents tailored for use in your procurement.
Notably, there is no template pack for use in open procedures and nothing on the Procurement Pathway website indicates that there will be. If you have not already done so, you should prepare your own pack for use in any procurements using the open procedure so that you are ready for the implementation of the Act.
NHS England templates
NHSE has produced a number of standard ITT pack documents that can be accessed on the NHS Futures website.
Procurement Specific Questionnaire (PSQ)
The GCF’s procurement specific questionnaire was published in December. Unlike the standard SQ under the PCR 2015, its use is not mandatory, and it is designed so that suppliers can provide some information via the central digital platform.
You will need to carry out your own review of the PSQ to ensure that you are satisfied with the information being gathered via the central digital platform (which is listed in regulations 9 to 12 of the Procurement Regulations 2024), particularly in relation to economic and financial standing where additional information might be required from suppliers. You will also need to ensure that you prepare questions and associated evaluation criteria in order to comply with any applicable PPNs and assess whether suppliers satisfy the conditions of participation.
Where you will be running a competitive flexible procedure, it is worth considering whether you wish to use scored questions for certain conditions of participation rather than pass/fail questions and, if so, how you will restrict the number of suppliers proceeding to each stage so that that this can be reflected in the design of your questionnaire.
Procurement Policy Notes
In December, two new PPNs were released (accessible here) setting out how to take account of a supplier’s approach to payment in the procurement of major contracts:
- PPN 015, which will come into force on 24 February 2025; and
- PPN 018, which will replace PPN 015 from 1 October 2025
The primary change in PPN 018 is that a supplier will be required to demonstrate that it pays all of its invoices within an average of 45 days (down from 55 days under PPN 015).
It is possible that more PPNs will be released before 24 February 2025, so we suggest that you monitor the PPN page for updates in the run up to the implementation of the Act.
How we can help
Our specialist procurement team is helping clients to update their procurement documents and policies in readiness for the implementation of the new Act.
If you have any questions regarding this update then please get in touch with Helen and Adrian or one of our specialist procurement team.