Every notice the Procurement Act created, and what it tells a supplier

The Procurement Act 2023 went live on 24 February 2025 and did something unusual: it made the public sector narrate itself. There is now a notice for the intention to buy, the decision to compete, the decision to stop, the award, the contract itself, changes to it, poor performance under it, and its end.

Lawyers called it death by a thousand notices. For a supplier it is the opposite problem — the information is there, and almost nobody reads past the tender notice.

The notices that tell you work is coming

Pipeline notice

Under section 93, a contracting authority expecting to spend more than £100m under relevant contracts in the coming financial year must publish, annually, the contracts above £2m it expects to award over an 18-month reporting period. This is the single most under-used document in UK procurement: a buyer telling you, in writing and up to a year and a half early, what it intends to buy. Private utilities and transferred Northern Ireland authorities are excluded.

Preliminary market engagement notice

Published when a buyer intends to engage the market before running a procurement. Attending is usually the difference between bidding on a specification you can meet and bidding on one written around somebody else's product.

Planned procurement notice

A signal that a specific procurement is coming, which can also shorten the eventual tendering period. Worth watching because it dates the opportunity: it tells you roughly when to have capacity free.

The notices about a live competition

The transparency notice deserves more attention than it gets. It exists to make direct awards visible, and it is published before the award is made. If you could have supplied that requirement, the window to say so is now, not after the contract details notice appears.

The notices after award

Contract award notice, then contract details notice

The award notice starts the standstill period. The contract details notice follows once the contract is signed and is the richer document — it carries the supplier, the value, the term, and for larger contracts the contract itself.

Contract change notice

Published when a contract is modified. Read these. A pattern of extensions and variations tells you a buyer is reluctant to re-compete, and the eventual re-let will be worth more than the original notice suggested.

Contract performance notice

This is the one with teeth. Buyers must publish breaches and failures to perform, including settlements. Poor performance can feed into exclusion from future procurements, which means a supplier's public record now has a downside as well as an upside.

How to actually use the trail

1. Monitor pipeline notices in your sector, not just tender notices. You are looking 12–18 months ahead.
2. Set an alert on transparency notices for your CPV codes. A direct award you could have competed for is worth one email.
3. When a tender lands, pull the buyer's award history first. Frequent extensions or a long-running incumbent changes your bid/no-bid answer.
4. Watch contract change notices on contracts you lost. An extension tells you when the real re-let is.
5. Read termination notices as opportunities. A procurement that failed once usually comes back, and the buyer has learned something you can use.

TenderGraph carries every notice type from the official sources, deduplicated so one procurement counts once rather than appearing eight times as it moves through its life. You can search the whole trail, or have an agent do it — the same data is available over an API and an MCP server.