25 October 2023 
Ashley Shelbrooke, HEPA and Project Specialist
Welcome to the latest update on the Transforming Public Procurement programme - shared with HEPA members on behalf of the Cabinet Office...
The Procurement Bill has now entered the final Consideration of Amendments (or 'ping-pong') stage, with debates taking place in the House of Lords (11th September) and the House of Commons (14th September). In the House of Lords there were votes on three amendments: with the Government winning two (on NHS procurement and the National Procurement Policy Statement) - but losing one relating to including an express provision for exclusions related to organ harvesting. The Government subsequently won the vote on organ harvesting in the House of Commons on the basis that the exclusion ground is already covered by existing Bill provisions.
The Bill will therefore return to the House of Lords this week on 25th October following the break for Party Conference Recess. We then hope to receive Royal Assent soon afterwards.
We are planning for the necessary secondary legislation to be laid early in 2024 and for the new regime to go live in October 2024.
You can view the Hansard records of all stages of the Bill’s progress, the current version of the Bill, and list of amendments here.
Following Royal Assent we will be running a series of webinars - open to all - which will help you understand more about the final shape of the Bill, look ahead to future key milestones, and to outline the guidance and support that will be provided as we progress to go-live in October 2024.
The webinars will take place on:
Register your place on a webinar here.
We continue regular engagement with eProcurement systems providers to assist them to make the changes necessary to support the new regime. Following the release of the first four notice types to the test environment in July, many providers have scheduled development work into their workflows in the coming months.
The next batch of notices is due to be released to the test environment by the end of November 2023. These will include the following notice types:
Work continues to develop the Supplier Information component of the platform. This will provide the functionality for suppliers to input and store commonly used procurement information. Following the discovery work with suppliers, contracting authorities and eProcurement system providers, we have built a prototype. This is now ready to be tested with users where we will gain further feedback to iterate and refine this further. If you would like to be involved in supplier information user testing, please contact procurement.reform@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
We will be organising dedicated engagement sessions for eProcurement system providers in the coming weeks to aid discussion around the data model. We will contact providers directly to book a place on one of these workshops.
