The New Transparency: What the Procurement Act’s Notice Regime Means for Social Value

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

The Procurement Act 2023 introduced up to 17 mandatory notice types spanning the full procurement lifecycle, from pipeline planning to published contract performance ratings.

This blog explains what these transparency requirements mean for social value in central government procurement, walks through the key notice stages, and sets out what contracting authorities need to have in place, providing a practical guide for procurement managers, contracts leads, and social value professionals.

How the Procurement Act Transparency Regime Changes Social Value Procurement

Procurement transparency once meant publishing a contract notice in OJEU and an award notice once the winner was chosen.

The Procurement Act 2023 replaces that relatively simple model with a far more comprehensive transparency regime:

• Up to 17 notice types, all published through the government’s Central Digital Platform (the enhanced Find a Tender service), covering every stage of the commercial lifecycle
• Pipeline plans going out 18 months and market engagement on the record
• Performance ratings published for the world to see
• Payment data, quarterly

For those of us in social value, this matters enormously. Bid commitments that used to vanish into filing cabinets or the gap between procurement and contract management are now part of a visible, searchable, public trail. That’s exciting, but it’s daunting if you haven’t got your data house in order –  particularly in the small teams that handle social value in most central government organisations.

Read the full list of notice types and guidance here.

1. Telling the Market What’s Coming: Pipeline and Market Engagement

The Procurement Act introduces a far more detailed transparency regime than the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. For the first time, the procurement lifecycle from pipeline planning through to contract performance is publicly visible through a structured series of notices.

For social value, this fundamentally changes how commitments are specified, tracked, and assessed over time.

These are two completely new notice types:

• Organisations spending £100 million-plus annually must publish a pipeline notice — an 18-month forward look at procurements worth £2 million and above
• Wherever pre-market engagement has taken place, a preliminary market engagement notice is mandatory. If you haven’t engaged, the tender notice must explain why

None of this existed under the Public Contract Regulations 2015.

For social value teams, there’s a real benefit here. These notices let you flag priority themes and outcomes before the formal process kicks off, starting a conversation with suppliers months before the Invitation to Tender (ITT) lands. Treat it as a tick-box and you’ll get boilerplate responses, but use it properly and you’ll shape genuinely tailored offers.

Furthermore, over time, as this data accumulates across departments, it also builds a public evidence base for what interventions work in which contexts.

2. A Permanent, Searchable Trail: Tender and Award

Tender and award notices aren’t new. But every notice is now linked by a unique, public, contracting process identifier, a thread running from pipeline planning through to performance data years later.

• The award notice has been split: a contract award notice before the decision (triggering standstill), then a contract details notice after signature.
• For contracts over £5 million, the contract documents themselves must be published.

That means social value commitments — KPIs, delivery plans, targets — aren’t tucked away any more. Other authorities, future bidders, and the public can all see them. Under the old regulations, contract documents almost never saw daylight. Now they do.

What you ask for in the tender and what you accept in the contract will be scrutinised.

This also changes the supplier experience. If you’re asking suppliers to report through specific tools, the cost and friction matters. Suppliers forced to pay for proprietary reporting systems or given unclear instructions tend to push back — and that shows up in data quality.

If authorities require suppliers to report through specific systems, the cost and usability of those tools matters.

Suppliers asked to pay for reporting licences, or given unclear reporting processes, often respond with minimal engagement or inconsistent data. Systems that allow suppliers to submit information without cost or friction typically see higher participation and better data quality.

3. Direct Awards: Notices No Longer Voluntary

Under the old regime, the Voluntary Ex-Ante Transparency Notice (VEAT) was voluntary.

The Act replaces it with a mandatory transparency notice before most direct awards.

Where social value is relevant, there’s now a published record of what’s expected, even without competitive pressure. A new layer of accountability, one that was overdue.

4. Published Performance Ratings: the Big One

This is the change with real teeth:

• For contracts over £5 million, authorities must set at least three KPIs, publish them with the contract, and then publish annual performance assessments on a standardised scale: Good, Approaching Target, Requires Improvement, Inadequate
• Serious underperformance can trigger a Contract Performance Notice, which must be published within 30 days and may ultimately lead to contract termination or supplier debarment.

In the past, a supplier could promise the earth and face precious little public accountability. Now, social value KPI performance is assessed, rated, and published. Good suppliers build visible track records, while poor performers find that record follows them around.

The catch: it only works if your KPIs are worth measuring. Woolly commitments produce woolly assessments. You need metrics that are specific, credible, and consistent across your portfolio so published data supports real comparison.

Worth noting too: social value KPIs now sit alongside financial transparency data — payment notices, compliance records, contract values. If your financial data is precise and auditable but your social value figures are vague, the contrast won’t go unnoticed.

For social value leads who’ve argued for years that their data deserves the same rigour as finance, this is a significant moment.

5. Modifications and Payments: Completing the Picture

• Contract change notices must be published whenever you modify a contract. If social value targets are scaled back or commitments varied, that’s on the public record.
• Payment notices go out quarterly for payments over £30,000.

Previously, both were handled with limited visibility. The entire lifecycle of a contract, including its social value dimension, is now subject to public oversight that didn’t exist before February 2025.

Why the Transparency Regime Changes Social Value Delivery

The notice regime shifts social value from a bid-stage narrative to an ongoing, visible performance record. Commitments, KPIs, contract changes, and supplier performance will now sit within a permanent public record linked across the entire procurement lifecycle.

That makes the quality of social value commitments, metrics, and reporting infrastructure far more important than before. Authorities that treat social value as structured operational data will find the system manageable. Those relying on ad hoc spreadsheets and manual reporting will struggle as transparency increases.

In Conclusion

What this all adds up to is an unbroken chain of published accountability, from planning through to contract completion. Authorities that collect structured, credible social value data from the start will find transparency drives better bids, stronger delivery, and greater stakeholder confidence. Authorities relying on spreadsheets or fragmented reporting processes will find the notice regime much harder to manage.

And if your data is audit-ready for published KPI assessments, it’s also ready for ESG reports, ministerial briefings, and stakeholder requests – one evidence base serving multiple purposes.

There’s a longer game too. Published data accumulates year by year, contract by contract. Authorities that start now with a consistent methodology will have the strongest evidence base in three to five years.

And because these requirements are statutory, they don’t disappear with a change of minister or a restructure. Social value has a degree of institutional permanence it hasn’t had before.

The question isn’t whether your social value commitments will be visible. They will be. The question is whether you’ve got the right foundations to make that visibility something you’re proud of.

Thrive helps contracting authorities and suppliers measure, manage, and report social value through the Impact Evaluation Standard — an independently governed framework with 130+ metrics aligned to the Social Value Model and developed using HM Treasury Green Book methodology.

Authorities can collect standardised data, track delivery at contract level, and benchmark performance across portfolios. Suppliers submit evidence through structured forms at no cost to themselves.

To see how the platform works, request a demonstration or contact the Thrive team.

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