Stay compliant with our essential procurement checklist
The Procurement Act 2023 has been live since February. How confident are you that your procurement function is compliant?
The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025. Five months in, the initial focus on understanding what the legislation says is shifting to a harder question: is your organisation actually operating compliantly under it?
For many public sector procurement teams, the honest answer is that compliance is uneven. Some processes have been updated. Others are still running on procedures designed for the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Evaluation templates may have been revised but not tested in a live procurement. Contract management obligations for higher-value agreements may not be fully embedded. Transparency notices are being published, but not always at every stage the Act requires. And the teams doing the work aren’t always confident they’re applying the new rules correctly, because the legislation is complex and the guidance is still evolving.
This isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a reflection of reality. Procurement teams across the public sector are stretched. The Act’s requirements touch every stage of the procurement lifecycle, from pipeline planning through to contract close-out, and implementing all of them while continuing to deliver day-to-day procurement takes time that most teams don’t have in abundance. Whether you’re in local government managing the broadest range of categories in the public sector, an NHS trust navigating the Act alongside the Provider Selection Regime for clinical services, a multi-academy trust applying the Act alongside the Academy Trust Handbook, or a blue light service embedding new transparency requirements for the first time, the compliance challenge is the same: you need to know where the gaps are before an audit, a challenge, or a governance review finds them for you.
This checklist gives you a structured way to review your procurement function against the Act’s requirements and identify where you need to take action.
What’s in the checklist
Procurement strategy and governance. Whether your procurement strategy, standing orders, and scheme of delegation have been updated to reflect the Act’s requirements. The policies that frame how your organisation procures need to align with the new legislation, not the old one.
Planning and pipeline. Whether you’re publishing pipeline notices and planning procurements in line with the Act’s requirements around preliminary market engagement, transparency, and the new notice obligations.
Running a compliant procurement process. From structuring competitions under the competitive flexible procedure to setting evaluation criteria for “most advantageous tender” rather than MEAT, and documenting every stage with the audit trail the Act demands.
Transparency and mandatory notices. A clear summary of every notice type the Act requires, when each must be published, and what information it must contain. This is the area where many organisations have the most significant gaps because the notice requirements are more extensive than under the previous regulations.
Contract management through the lifecycle. The Act’s requirements around KPI setting and publication for contracts above £5 million, performance assessment, contract modification documentation, and the governance standards expected through the full contract term.
Legal alignment. How the Act interacts with FOI obligations, GDPR, subsidy control, and the specific performance data rules that are new under this legislation.
Supplier management and exclusion. The mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds, the centralised debarment list, and what your team needs to understand about checking suppliers against these requirements.
Who this checklist is for
This checklist is for procurement managers, heads of procurement, compliance leads, and governance professionals in any UK public sector organisation operating under the Procurement Act 2023. If you’re responsible for ensuring your organisation’s procurement is lawful, defensible, and audit-ready, this checklist gives you a structured framework to assess where you stand.
It’s relevant whether your organisation has been working on Act compliance since before it came into force or is still in the early stages of implementing the changes. The checklist identifies gaps regardless of how far along you are. It’s also useful for finance directors and senior leaders who need assurance that the procurement function is meeting its legal obligations without having to understand every detail of the legislation themselves.
In Summary
Five months into the Procurement Act 2023, the organisations that will be best positioned are those that have taken the time to review their processes systematically rather than assuming that updating a few templates was enough. This checklist gives you that systematic review. Download it, work through it with your procurement team, and if you identify gaps that need specialist support to close, Inprova’s procurement transformation and risk and compliance services are designed for exactly this. 100% of Inprova’s eligible staff completed four-day Procurement Act training so our team is ready to support yours.
Inprova published a preparation checklist before the Procurement Act 2023 came into force, designed to help organisations get ready for the new legislation. This compliance checklist is different. It’s written for organisations that are already operating under the Act and need to assess whether their processes are actually meeting the requirements in practice, not just in policy. The preparation checklist focused on what needed to change before 24 February 2025: updating policies, revising templates, training staff, and communicating changes. This compliance checklist focuses on what should be in place now: whether your procurement processes are running correctly under the new rules, whether your transparency obligations are being met consistently, whether your contract management practices satisfy the Act’s lifecycle requirements, and whether your governance documentation would withstand scrutiny from auditors or a legal challenge. Many organisations completed the preparation work but are finding that implementation hasn’t been as thorough as they intended. Processes that were updated on paper aren’t always being followed consistently in practice. Notice requirements are being met for some procurements but missed on others. Contract management obligations haven’t been fully embedded for existing agreements. This checklist helps you find those gaps before someone else does.
Five months into the Act, the gaps we’re seeing most frequently across public sector organisations fall into several categories. Transparency notice compliance is the most widespread issue. The Act requires notices at more stages and with more information than the previous regulations, and many organisations are publishing some notices but not all of them, or not with all the required content. Evaluation methodology is another common area. Teams have updated their templates to reference “most advantageous tender” but haven’t fundamentally changed how they structure evaluations or document their assessment rationale. Contract management obligations for agreements above £5 million, including KPI setting, publication, and annual performance assessment, are often the last element to be implemented because they require changes to how contracts are managed day to day rather than just how procurements are run. And the competitive flexible procedure, while offering more flexibility than the procedures it replaced, requires careful documentation of how and why each competition was structured, which teams accustomed to the more rigid previous procedures don’t always capture. This checklist addresses each of these areas systematically.
Yes. The Procurement Act 2023 applies to all NHS procurement of non-clinical goods, works, and services: estates maintenance, construction, facilities management, compliance services, IT, recruitment, and corporate services. Clinical healthcare services are governed separately under the Provider Selection Regime, which came into force in January 2024. For NHS procurement teams, this creates a dual compliance challenge that is unique to the healthcare sector. Every procurement must be correctly classified to determine which regime applies, and the wrong classification can expose the trust to legal challenge. The practical impact of the Act on NHS non-clinical procurement is the same as for any other public sector body: new transparency requirements, the shift to most advantageous tender evaluation, the competitive flexible procedure, and the contract management obligations for higher-value agreements. But the overlay of the PSR means NHS teams have an additional layer of complexity to navigate. This checklist covers the Procurement Act requirements that apply to non-clinical procurement. NHS organisations should also ensure they have clear governance for determining which regime applies to each procurement and that staff understand the boundary between the two.
Finding gaps is the point of the checklist. Better to identify them through a structured self-assessment than through an audit finding, a supplier challenge, or a governance review that catches you off guard. If the gaps are primarily about process and documentation, updating your procurement procedures, templates, and governance frameworks may be something your team can handle internally using the checklist as a roadmap. If the gaps are more fundamental, for example if your team isn’t confident operating the competitive flexible procedure, if your contract management practices haven’t been adapted for the Act’s lifecycle requirements, or if your transparency notice compliance is inconsistent, you may need external support to close them effectively. Inprova’s procurement transformation services include risk and compliance assessment, procurement toolkits that are designed to meet the Act’s requirements, and training for procurement teams and wider stakeholders. Our consultants completed four-day comprehensive training on the Act and work with public sector organisations across education, healthcare, local government, blue light, and defence, so they understand how the legislation interacts with the specific governance frameworks in your sector. There’s no cost or commitment in an initial conversation about what you’ve found and what support might help.
