Rules and Regulations When Tendering: What Every Supplier Needs to Know in 2026
Public procurement in the UK has changed more in the past 18 months than in the previous decade. The Procurement Act 2023 came into force on 24 February 2025, replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and the EU-derived framework that governed UK tendering for over a decade. New financial thresholds came into effect on 1 January 2026. And further reforms — on transparency, payment compliance, SME access, and social value — continue to reshape the landscape throughout 2026.
For suppliers tendering for contracts, understanding these rules is not optional. Non-compliance with mandatory requirements disqualifies your submission regardless of how strong your written responses are. And understanding how buyers are obligated to operate gives you a significant strategic advantage over competitors who treat procurement rules as background noise.
This guide covers the key rules and regulations every supplier needs to understand — including the Procurement Act 2023, how tenders must be evaluated, TUPE obligations, exclusion grounds, and what has changed in 2026. For a complete guide to producing a winning submission within this framework, see our guide to how to write a bid.
The Procurement Act 2023: What Has Changed
The Procurement Act 2023 is the most significant reform to UK public procurement in a generation. It came into force on 24 February 2025 and replaced the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, the Utilities Contracts Regulations 2016, and the Concession Contracts Regulations 2016 with a single unified legislative framework.
For suppliers, the key changes are:
A new evaluation standard: the Most Advantageous Tender. The Procurement Act replaces the old Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) standard with the Most Advantageous Tender (MAT). This explicitly broadens the evaluation criteria beyond economic value — requiring buyers to assess quality, price, and social value together. It is no longer sufficient to be the cheapest. The best overall submission wins.
Greater transparency obligations. Buyers are now required to publish significantly more information throughout the procurement process — including pipeline notices, award notices, contract details notices, and contract performance notices. The UK9 Contract Performance Notice is now in effect for England and Wales, recording supplier performance against KPIs for public contracts with an estimated value of more than £5 million. For suppliers, this transparency is an intelligence asset: award notices and contract performance data tell you who currently holds contracts, what they were awarded for, and when re-procurement is likely.
Payment transparency. The UK17 Payments Compliance Notice is now operative, requiring public bodies to report their average time taken to pay invoices to suppliers, demonstrating compliance with 30-day payment terms. This strengthens supplier protections significantly.
Stronger SME access. The Act includes explicit provisions to increase SME participation in public procurement — including simplified procedures, reduced bureaucratic requirements, and a renewed government commitment to directing spend toward smaller businesses.
New financial thresholds from 1 January 2026. From 1 January 2026, new threshold amounts under The Procurement Act 2023 (Threshold Amounts) (Amendment) Regulations 2025 came into force. Most thresholds have decreased, meaning more contracts are now covered by the Act. If you were previously operating below the threshold and outside the regulated regime, that may no longer be the case. Check the current thresholds against your contract pipeline.
What Buyers Are Obligated to Do When Tendering
Understanding your obligations as a supplier is important. Understanding the buyer’s obligations is equally valuable — because their compliance requirements create the structure within which you compete, and knowing that structure gives you a competitive edge.
Under the Procurement Act 2023, public sector buyers in England and Wales are required to:
Publish contract opportunities transparently. Above-threshold contracts must be published on Find a Tender Service. Below-threshold contracts must be published on Contracts Finder from 1 April 2026. This means opportunities are accessible to any eligible supplier — geography, existing relationships, and incumbent advantage are significantly constrained by the transparency obligations the Act imposes.
Communicate evaluation criteria clearly. Buyers must inform all suppliers of exactly how tenders will be evaluated — the weighting between quality, price, and social value — before submissions are made. This information is your strategic blueprint. Use it to allocate your writing effort precisely where the marks are. Our guide to how bids are scored explains how to read and respond to evaluation frameworks effectively.
Apply consistent, non-discriminatory evaluation. Every submission must be assessed against the same published criteria by the same evaluation panel. Buyers cannot favour incumbent suppliers, preferred organisations, or suppliers from particular regions — though a recent Order has removed a long-standing restriction that previously prevented local authorities from considering supplier location when awarding public contracts. This is a notable change worth monitoring for local authority tenders specifically.
Ask only for information relevant to the opportunity. Buyers cannot request documentation, policies, or evidence that is disproportionate to the contract value or complexity. If a buyer is requesting information that seems excessive, you have grounds to raise a clarification question challenging its relevance.
State all deadlines clearly. This includes deadlines for clarification questions, submission deadlines, the standstill period, and the contract award date. Organise your tender timeline around these dates from day one.
Provide a minimum 8-day standstill period. Under the Procurement Act 2023, the standstill period between contract award notification and actual contract award has been reduced from 10 days to a minimum of 8 days. This is the window during which unsuccessful suppliers can challenge the award decision. If you receive an unsuccessful notification, review the score feedback immediately — you have a limited window to act if you believe the evaluation was flawed.
TUPE: Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment
TUPE — the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, as amended — is one of the most practically significant pieces of legislation for suppliers winning contracts through competitive tender. It applies whenever a contract changes hands from one supplier to another and the staff delivering that contract transfer to the new provider.
How TUPE works in practice
When a buyer awards a contract to a new supplier, and the existing supplier’s employees have been working substantially on that contract, those employees typically transfer to the new supplier under TUPE. Their existing terms and conditions of employment — including pay, holiday entitlement, sick pay, and contractual benefits — transfer with them. The new supplier cannot simply impose new terms.
For example: a facilities management company wins a contract to deliver cleaning services for a local authority, replacing the incumbent supplier. Three members of the incumbent’s cleaning team have been delivering that contract. Under TUPE, those three employees transfer to the new supplier with their existing employment terms protected.
TUPE applies most commonly in sectors where continuous service delivery is required: facilities management, cleaning, security, construction, healthcare, IT and technology support, and logistics. It is less common in professional services and consultancy contracts where work is project-based rather than service-based.
What you need to do when TUPE applies
Assess the TUPE schedule thoroughly. Buyers are required to provide a TUPE schedule — typically a spreadsheet detailing the employees who will transfer, their current terms and conditions, and their associated liabilities including pension obligations, holiday accrual, and sick pay entitlements. Review this document in full before finalising your pricing. The cost of TUPE staff must be accurately reflected in your commercial submission.
Price correctly for inherited staff. The employees you inherit may be on different pay rates, different contractual terms, or different working patterns from your existing workforce. Failing to account for these variances accurately in your pricing model is one of the most common — and costly — errors suppliers make when responding to contracts where TUPE applies.
Understand your consultation obligations. As the incoming employer, you have legal obligations to consult with transferring employees. Understand whether the buyer will facilitate initial communications or whether you are expected to contact transferring staff directly, and at what stage in the procurement process.
Address TUPE in your tender response. Most tenders where TUPE applies will include specific questions about your TUPE management approach. Describe clearly how you will manage the transfer, how you will engage with transferring employees, and — where appropriate — reference your use of specialist employment law advice to ensure full compliance with TUPE regulations.
Seek specialist legal advice. TUPE is legally complex and the consequences of non-compliance are significant. For any contract where TUPE applies, engaging a qualified employment law specialist is a sound investment — and stating in your tender response that you will do so demonstrates to the buyer that you take your obligations seriously.
Exclusion Grounds and Self-Cleaning
The Procurement Act 2023 maintains a framework of mandatory and discretionary exclusion grounds that buyers must apply when assessing supplier eligibility. Understanding these grounds — and the self-cleaning provisions that can allow suppliers to overcome them — is essential for any organisation with a complex corporate history.
Mandatory exclusion grounds
Mandatory exclusion grounds are pass/fail criteria. If your organisation has been convicted of any of the following, you will be automatically excluded from the procurement unless you can demonstrate effective self-cleaning:
- Corruption and bribery
- Fraud
- Tax evasion
- Money laundering
- Terrorist financing
- Human trafficking and modern slavery offences
- Organised crime
Discretionary exclusion grounds
Discretionary grounds give buyers the option — but not the obligation — to exclude suppliers. These include: breaches of environmental or social obligations, insolvency or financial distress, misrepresentation in a previous procurement, poor performance on a previous contract, and involvement in anti-competitive arrangements.
Self-cleaning
Self-cleaning is the mechanism that allows suppliers who have previously breached exclusion grounds to demonstrate that they have taken sufficient remedial action to be considered for public contracts. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can submit a self-cleaning statement alongside their tender response, setting out:
- Evidence of proactive collaboration with investigatory or regulatory bodies — including the police, the Health and Safety Executive, or the Environment Agency — detailing the issue and how it was identified and addressed
- Specific, verifiable steps taken to prevent any recurrence — including changes to governance, internal controls, personnel, and organisational culture
Whether self-cleaning is accepted remains entirely at the buyer’s discretion. If a buyer rejects a self-cleaning statement, they must provide a detailed written explanation of why the measures taken are considered insufficient. If your organisation is in this position, specialist legal advice before submitting a self-cleaning statement is strongly recommended.
Social Value: Now a Core Evaluation Criterion
Social value is no longer an optional consideration in public procurement — it is a formally weighted evaluation criterion in the majority of above-threshold public sector tenders. The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires buyers to consider how services can improve economic, social, and environmental wellbeing in their area. The Procurement Act 2023 reinforces and extends this requirement.
In practice, this means your tender response will almost certainly include social value questions — and the marks available for those questions can represent 10% or more of your overall score. Generic statements about corporate social responsibility will not earn full marks. Buyers want specific, measurable, locally relevant commitments connected to their stated priorities.
Social value commitments that score well typically fall into three categories:
Economic: creating local employment opportunities, providing apprenticeships, supporting supply chain spend within the local economy, engaging SMEs and social enterprises as subcontractors.
Environmental: ISO 14001 accreditation, carbon reduction targets with specific milestones, sustainable procurement policies, cycle-to-work schemes, electric vehicle commitments.
Social: partnerships with local charities, volunteering commitments, support for underrepresented groups in employment, community engagement activities relevant to the contract location.
Our guide to social value and tendering covers how to develop a credible social value offering that scores maximum marks.
How Together: The Hudson Collective Helps You Navigate These Rules
The rules and regulations around tendering are not obstacles — they are the framework within which every contract is won or lost. Understanding them gives you a structural advantage over competitors who treat compliance as an afterthought. Applying them correctly, across every section of every submission, is what produces the 87% win rate our team at Together: The Hudson Collective holds across all sectors.
We are a global strategic bid partner — with offices in the UK, US, and India — working with 3,500+ organisations across 52 countries. Our services are designed to support you at every stage of the tendering process, from pre-bid strategy through to submission management and post-award review:
End-to-End Bid Management — complete ownership of the bid process from opportunity qualification to portal submission, including compliance mapping, exclusion ground assessment, and TUPE pricing support.
Bid Writing — high-scoring, fully compliant written responses across public and private sector tenders, frameworks, and international submissions.
Bid Review — forensic evaluation of your draft submission before you submit, including a compliance check against every mandatory requirement in the specification.
Strategic Bid Advisory — executive-level guidance on framework strategy, competitor positioning, social value development, and building the bid infrastructure that produces sustainable competitive advantage.
AI-Powered Competitive Edge — proprietary tools built to accelerate bid performance and improve win probability across your pipeline.
Explore our services or start the conversation today. Send us your tender documents and we will review the opportunity and provide a quote within four working hours.
About the author: Written by Joshua Smith, a seasoned bid-writing expert with experience across the UK, Middle East and US, helping organisations secure the contracts they deserve through high-quality, competitive tender responses.