The UK Procurement Act 2023 introduces greater transparency across the procurement process. In many cases, contracting authorities will need to publish additional notices, evidence early market engagement and clearly justify award decisions.

At the same time, the shift from Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) to Most Advantageous Tender (MAT), places greater emphasis on explaining how award decisions align with broader value considerations.

For many organisations, this transition has exposed a structural issue that existed long before the legislation changed. The challenge is that many organisations are still managing procurement planning through fragmented spreadsheets, inboxes and different systems that hold different parts of the story. 

In our recent Mercell webinar “Connecting the Dots: From Isolated Planning to Integrated Procurement”, we discussed how this fragmented approach increases compliance risk under the Procurement Act and what a more structured planning model looks like in practice.

 

A sector under pressure 

Disconnected planning creates inefficiencies, with teams losing time chasing information, responding late to requirements and reconstructing decisions. At the same time, procurement teams are expected to deliver more, evidence more and manage more scrutiny, often without structural change to the way planning is handled. 

The Procurement Act reinforces this pressure. The Act places strong emphasis on transparency from the earliest stages of a procurement. Authorities must be able to show how they engaged the market, why specifications were set in a particular way and how decisions evolved over time. If that information cannot be evidenced clearly, authorities increase their exposure to supplier challenge, audit criticism or reputational damage.

The result is what we described in the webinar as a “flexibility versus integrity paradox”. Contracting authorities have more freedom to design procedures, but they also have to carry a much higher burden of proof to demonstrate fairness, transparency and defensibility. 

 

The golden thread is a compliance requirement 

The Procurement Act introduces the concept of a “Golden Thread”, meaning a single, continuous chain of information from initial planning through to contract performance. This isn’t simply about document storage, but about evidencing why decisions were made at each stage. 

In practice, the thread breaks when procurement planning lives in spreadsheets, stakeholder discussions happen in inboxes, clarifications are scattered across shared drives, and historical reasoning resides in the memory of individuals. If early discussions about technical requirements or budget constraints cannot be retrieved two years later, the authority may struggle to defend its position in the event of a challenge.

When information is fragmented like this, the thread is broken. And a broken thread is a compliance risk.

A supplier who believes they were unfairly excluded can issue a claim. An auditor can request evidence of early market engagement. A court can require disclosure of how a requirement was defined. If the authority cannot reconstruct that reasoning clearly, the problem is not the decision itself, but the inability to evidence it.

This is why the knowledge must belong to the contracting authority, not the individual officer. Decisions, dialogue and reasoning need to sit within a structured system, not in personal inboxes or memory.

Procurement decisions can also become subject to intense public scrutiny even where a formal legal challenge has not yet been brought. For example, a £330 million NHS contract awarded to an AI services firm was recently criticised in national media after health officials and MPs raised concerns about transparency and value for money in the procurement process. The Department of Health maintained that a competitive process had been followed, but the controversy illustrates how quickly procurement decisions can become reputational issues when process and documentation are questioned.

In an environment where scrutiny can escalate quickly, authorities must be able to demonstrate not only that they followed the rules, but how and why key decisions were made.

 

Why “strategic procurement planning” often fails in practice

There is frequent discussion about strategic procurement planning, yet many Heads of Procurement describe a reality where teams spend significant time chasing specifications, clarifying incomplete requests and searching for historical decisions instead of shaping sourcing strategy.

When requirements arrive late or without structure, teams are forced into reactive behaviour. Deadlines tighten, documentation becomes rushed and opportunities for proper market engagement are reduced. Under the new Act, that increases the likelihood that key decisions are poorly evidenced or inconsistently recorded.

Planning has often been treated as a “back office” task before the “real work” of procurement begins. The Act makes clear that planning is where compliance starts. If early engagement is not documented properly or the rationale behind specifications is not captured, risk is embedded long before the contract notice is published.

Integrated planning changes the starting point. It builds structure and transparency into the earliest stage of the procurement lifecycle rather than attempting to apply control at the end.

 

Intake management: Where compliance begins 

One of the most practical points discussed in the session was intake management, which in simple terms means structuring how procurement requests are submitted to the procurement team. 

In many organisations, requests still come through informal and unstructured routes such as emails or verbal conversations, often with incomplete information and unrealistic timelines. This immediately limits the ability to plan properly and record early decisions. 

A structured intake management process replaces that with a single, standardised route for submitting requirements; “a single front door”. Stakeholders complete a defined form that captures essential information at the outset. Dialogue between procurement and the requesting department takes place within one system, creating a documented audit trail from the moment the requirement is identified.

Where services are diverse and procurement may be triggered by a wide range of departments, this structure prevents requirements from being lost in personal inboxes and ensures visibility across the organisation. 

It also changes stakeholder experience. When stakeholders can see where their request sits within a shared procurement plan, conversations move from “Where is my contract?” to informed discussions about sequencing, priorities and capacity.

 

From capacity control to commercial advantage 

Fragmented planning doesn’t only create compliance risk, it also affects workload management and commercial outcomes. Without a consolidated forward view, it’s easy for multiple major procurements to be scheduled simultaneously. Teams discover resource bottlenecks too late to adjust, deadlines compress and quality can suffer as officers are forced to manage competing priorities at the same time.

Visibility allows procurement leaders to see those pressure points months in advance and re-sequence projects accordingly, protecting both team capacity and the quality of the procurement process.

Visibility does more than protect capacity. It also improves commercial decision-making.

Centralised planning creates commercial opportunity. When procurement activity is visible across an organisation, overlaps become apparent. Separate departments planning similar procurements in the same period can be identified early, and expiring contracts can be aligned with future sourcing needs. Instead of processing isolated requests, procurement can shape aggregated opportunities where appropriate.

This supports collaboration across services and improved value for taxpayers, and enables more coordinated approaches to major spend categories.

The shift is subtle but significant. Procurement moves from processing requests to shaping demand.

 

The shift procurement leaders must make

The Procurement Act increases the requirement to document, justify and publish decisions throughout the procurement lifecycle. That shift will feel like an additional burden for authorities that continue to rely on fragmented planning and disconnected systems.

Authorities that embed structured intake, centralised planning and end-to-end visibility will find that compliance becomes easier, defensibility becomes stronger and commercial decisions become more deliberate rather than reactive. 

The core message from the webinar is that planning is not a preliminary task before “real procurement” begins. It’s the stage where compliance is established, where transparency is built and where commercial value is shaped.

Under the Procurement Act, authorities are not only judged on what they award, but on how and why those decisions were made. The difference between reactive administration and strategic control is whether that story can be clearly evidenced from day one.