28 March 2024 
Ashley Shelbrooke, HEPA and Project Specialist
Welcome to the March edition of our Transforming Public Procurement stakeholder update.
The Cabinet Office is pleased to confirm that the Procurement Regulations 2024 were laid in Parliament on 25 March. This statutory instrument (SI), a form of secondary legislation, is available to view here.
This SI applies a broad range of powers within the Procurement Act, providing additional detail around various aspects of the new procurement regime.
This additional detail will support contracting authorities in assessing the applicability of the Act, for example, providing lists of goods and services that are subject to lighter touch provisions and the content of the Transparency notices.
The SI will be also debated in both Houses - a procedural step in the process when laying secondary legislation before being signed into law.
On 22 March, the team also published the Government’s response to the Cabinet Office two-step public consultation on the draft regulations conducted over the summer of 2023.
Consultation questions sought to understand the extent to which the draft secondary legislation provisions effectively implement the policy intent as set out in the Bill, in order to improve the drafting of the SI.
Stakeholders from a broad range of sectors responded to the consultation. It was important to obtain this feedback and input on the technical detail contained within the draft regulations, and we are extremely grateful to those that took the time to respond.
The consultation found stakeholders to be overwhelmingly supportive of the draft regulations, and therefore no significant changes to the draft were deemed necessary.
With regards to proposals set out to improve transparency, stakeholders were in agreement that the proposals achieved what they set out to achieve, and once again, no significant changes to the proposals were needed.
The provisions contained in both consultation stages were combined under the one single SI which was laid this week.
You can read the full consultation response, published on gov.uk, here.
There are some slight changes to the content of the SI from the draft regulations, for example the regulations for transition will follow later and other specific regulations such as the utilities calculations are not included within this SI. These calculations will be published as soon as possible, and we will keep you updated on this.
The Cabinet Office continue to plan for commencement of the new regime in October 2024 - the go-live date will be announced shortly and formalised by its own distinct Commencement Order laid before Parliament.
To support our stakeholders in their preparation for the Act, the Cabinet Office will be publishing a suite of guidance documents that address all aspects of the new regime.
These guidance documents cover a broad range of subjects from covered procurement through to pre-market engagement, award rules, exclusions and contract modifications.
The documents are intended to provide technical guidance, and help with interpretation and understanding of the new regime.
The team can confirm that the first suite of documents have been published on the Transforming Public Procurement pages on gov.uk pages, comprising:
Transition guidance will also be published shortly. The team will be publishing the guidance documents in batches and aim to publish the full suite of documents for all by the end of June 2024.
Please note that members can subscribe to the above gov.uk page and as a result, receive a notification when the page is updated with further guidance documents. We will also be in touch when further guidance documents are due to be published.
For all your questions relating to implementation of the Act please email the service desk at procurement.reform@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
The Transforming Public Procurement landing page contains a range of information about the programme including details of the Learning and Development package, the Knowledge Drops aimed at both contracting authorities and suppliers - which have now been viewed over 22,00 times - guidance documents to help planning and preparation, and an outline of the benefits of the new regime for suppliers.
