The Cabinet Office has developed a portfolio of products aimed at different audiences. These include:

• Knowledge drops
• E-learning
• Advanced course deep dives
• Communities of practice.

Interestingly, most of the learning is focused at the buyer side, with a few Knowledge Drops aimed at suppliers. Therefore, this section provides an awareness to bidders of the training procurement teams will be going through, rather than an opportunity for bidders to join the training.

The Cabinet Office will be rolling out learning and development programmes for procurement and commercial teams. This includes contract managers, finance teams, service commissioners, legal advisers, and reporting teams. The Cabinet Office is asking all organisations to treat the Procurement Act 2023 as an organisational change programme and therefore consider:

• Future pipelines of work in the next 12 months that would benefit from new flexibilities.
• Review commercial strategies including planning, governance assurance and resources to enable the implementation of the new regime.
• Consider who will attend funded training and work on the operational roll out.
• Share the aims of reform widely with senior stakeholders and change makers.
• Help communicate the changes with suppliers and encourage the market to embrace the Act.

The Cabinet Office wants to see all buying teams have a named individual in their organisation to be responsible for co-ordinating and championing the change.

There is a drive that buyers should be conducting early engagement with suppliers as a matter of policy. The Cabinet Office sees the use of the new flexibilities in procurement as fundamental to procurement reform and that commercial teams need to invest time in learning and development in order to get the most out of the transformation.

The Cabinet Office sees the new Procurement Act as a benefit to suppliers of all sizes, particularly start-ups, scale ups and small businesses.

It will create a single central digital platform for suppliers to register and store their details, with the ability for these details to be used for multiple bids. Through this platform, suppliers will also be able to see all opportunities in one place.

Commercial frameworks will be more flexible, so prospective suppliers are not shut out for long periods of time. This is just one of the methods the Act will remove bureaucratic barriers and level the playing field for smaller businesses, so that they can compete for more contracts.

The Act is seen as important to driving innovation, deliver better outcomes and embed transparency through the commercial lifecycle.

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Pre-market engagements are an important part of the procurement process for enabling innovation and to allow bidders access to influence the solution. Buyers need to provide the opportunity to listen to bidders and understand any barriers to the procurement to get the best result.

Buyers will benefit from engagement opportunities to understand potential cost savings beyond the should cost assessment and determine what good looks like in what they are buying.

It is recognised that pre-market engagements can be limited with companies not wanting to share their position or IP in a room full of competitors. The Procurement Act is designed to address this risk with a more flexible approach.

All engagement sessions should provide feedback to the bidders – summarising the engagement in writing and be provided alongside the ITT so that those who could not attend are not left behind.

Pre-market engagements should also be proportionate to the procurement.

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Whilst the Act doesn’t mention social value directly, it is an intrinsic part of the reform. The Act, through MAT evaluation and driving accountability lends itself to a more innovative social value, with more flexibility.

The Act encourages pre-market engagement – which is a fundamental opportunity to understanding the art of the possible in social value, relevant to the opportunity.

The Cabinet Office encourage bidders to raise with the relevant procurement office if you get social value questions that are not relevant or proportionate. Additionally, please share these experiences with the APMP UK Social Value Group

• Develop a Social Value Strategy.
• Focus on how you integrate social value into your day-to-day business rather than as an ‘extra add on’ to specific projects.
• Take the time to understand local needs and engage with your buyers.
• Measure what you are already doing and engage your own teams.
• Take the time to understand the needs of your buyers so you can tailor your responses.
• Think about your own supply chain – how can you behave like a public buyer.

Evaluating social value in tenders

Procurement teams will need to agree internally the social value (%) weighting as well as the sub weighting (qualitative / quantitative) applied across your tenders. There is the potential for buyers to opt to have a standard weighting (i.e., 10% applied across tenders with a 50/50 (5%) split across both elements or to decide this on a tender-by-tender basis.

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• Any competitive procedure you consider appropriate to award the public contract.
• Buyers must explain in the tender notice the process they intend to use to run the procedure.
  • This could be as simple as running a process akin to a restricted, i.e., a simple two stage process with no scope for negotiation.
  • Or they could tailor the process to include negotiation or dialogue.
  • They could invite tenders from all and then invite the top scores to negotiate and determine the MAT following best and final tenders.
• There is lots of potential, and it gives buyers the freedom to use their commercial skills to get the best from the market.

• The Procurement Act consolidates a number of currently separate regulations; the new rules needed to be flexible enough to cover them all.
• The Cabinet Office also wanted to give contracting authorities flexibility to use their commercial skills to get the best for their procurement.
• The open remains as a standalone procedure.
• The competitive flexible is a balance – there is freedom, but there remains scope to run a straightforward procedure.

1. Preliminary market engagement, develop procurement strategy, prepare tender notice, and associated tender documents.
2. Publish tender notice and any associated tender documents inviting requests to participate.
3. Following the participation period, receive requests to participate, assess conditions of participation, exclusions and any other objective criteria set to limit suppliers.
4. Inform suppliers who will not be invited to tender.
5. Invite those who have made it through the participation stage to tender by issuing the invitation to tender.
6. Following the tendering period, and once you have received the tenders, evaluate tenders against the award criteria and determine the most advantageous tender (MAT)
7. Inform suppliers of the outcome and issue assessment summaries
8. Publish the contract award notice (triggering the mandatory or voluntary standstill period where appropriate, with a minimum of 8 working days)
9. Publish the contract details notice and a copy of the contract (if required).

Use it responsibly:

• Need to be useful – but don’t run away with IP and USPs: no bidder likes to see their good ideas replayed verbatim as a contract requirement.
• Don’t just pay it lip service: bidders won’t engage fully in the process if they cannot see any impact.
• Don’t create a problem for potential bidders:

• Must treat the supplier as an excluded supplier if the PME has put the supplier at an unfair advantage / advantage cannot be avoided (see section 16(4) and (5))
• Don’t rush it: need time to incorporate results into the design or substance of the competition.

Different methods

• Surveys, questionnaires, B2B meetings, webinars, conferences, presentations, interviews, demonstrations, site visits etc.
• Can be quite arms-length or involved.
• Keep a record (see section 98)
• Consider feeding back and publish results- to avoid an advantage being conferred.

• Section 16(1): BEFORE publishing a tender notice (can be after the planned procurement notice – see section 15).
• Built into the procurement programme.
• Must publish a ‘preliminary market engagement notice if carrying out PME (s 17(1))
• Before tender notice OR provide reasons why you didn’t PME in the tender notice (s 17(1)(b))

Section 16(1) Procurement Act 2023:

• Develop the requirements and approach to the procurement.
• Designing the procedure (including conditions of participation / award criteria)
• Preparing the tender notice and tender documents
• Identifying potential suppliers
• Identifying likely contractual terms
• Building capacity among suppliers in relation to the contract
• Can help:
  • Openly and transparently discuss the procurement and get a better understanding of the issues.
  • Design of the competition and timing: is it going to work for your bidders?
  • Warm up the marketplace: get them excited in the opportunity.
  • Help articulate the requirement – how much is it going to cost / what are the barriers to overcome.
  • Opportunities for innovation, social value, net zero aspects

This flowchart demonstrates the notices and other information that you may publish throughout the end-to-end procurement lifecycle (depending on the procurement procedure followed, the nature of the contract and I or the contracting authority). This is for illustrative purposes only.

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