From PCR 2015 to a transparency-first regime
On 24 February 2025 the Procurement Act 2023 went live, sweeping away the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and the EU-derived rules that had governed UK public buying for a decade. The change is not cosmetic. The old regime was built around process: run the right procedure, publish the right notice, observe the standstill, and you were broadly compliant. The new regime is built around transparency, and transparency leaves a trail. Where PCR 2015 asked authorities to follow a recipe, the Act asks them to show their working across the life of a contract.
For suppliers this matters more than the headlines suggest. Every record an authority must now keep is a record about you: how your bid was scored, what was said in pre-market engagement, why you won or lost, and how you have performed since. If a dispute arises, those records become evidence. If you cannot reconcile them with your own files, you argue from a weaker position than the buyer sitting on a tidy three-year archive.
Section 98 in plain English: the 3-year duty
Section 98 of the Act requires contracting authorities to keep records of every material decision to award a contract, together with any pre-contract communication with suppliers. A material decision is, in practice, any decision that shapes the outcome: shortlisting, scoring, the application of award criteria, who to invite, the decision not to award at all. Pre-contract communication captures clarifications, market engagement and the exchanges that precede a formal bid.
The retention period is three years, measured either from the date of a decision-not-to-award notice or from the date the contract is entered into. Defence and security contracts are carved out of this duty. Three years aligns with the window in which a procurement decision can be challenged, so an authority that destroys records too early may discard its own best defence.
Suppliers should mirror this discipline. If the buyer holds your scored submission, your clarification responses and the rationale for their decision, you want the matching set in your own archive, indexed to the same contract and dates. The asymmetry to avoid is the buyer being able to produce a document you cannot.
The 2026 notice calendar
The Act layers a series of transparency notices on top of the record-keeping duty, and 2026 is when most of them bite. The notices are published on the Central Digital Platform, the single front door for UK procurement data. The key dates:
- KPIs (Section 52): for public contracts above GBP 5 million, authorities must set and publish key performance indicators and report against them.
- Contract Performance Notices, UK9 (Section 71): effective 1 January 2026. Supplier performance against those KPIs is published every 12 months, and on termination, for contracts over GBP 5m in England and Wales.
- Payments Compliance Notices, UK17 (Section 69): the first reporting period runs 1 October 2025 to 31 March 2026, with a publication deadline of 30 April 2026, measured against the 30-day payment standard.
- Payment Disclosures (Section 70): effective 1 April 2026. The first quarter, April to June 2026, is due by 29 July 2026, and the duty applies to individual payments over GBP 30,000 including VAT.
There is also a registration step. From 1 April 2026, suppliers of notifiable below-threshold contracts (GBP 12,000 for central government, GBP 30,000 for sub-central bodies) must register for a unique supplier ID on the Central Digital Platform. That ID becomes the thread tying your notices, performance data and payment history together in public view.
Who is watching
Enforcement is spread across several bodies. The Procurement Compliance Service (PCS) reviews how authorities apply the Act and can issue recommendations. The Public Procurement Review Service (PPRS) handles supplier concerns and payment complaints. The Debarment Review Service (DRS) maintains the exclusion machinery, transferring to the Government Commercial Agency from 1 April 2026.
The teeth sit in two places. Sections 108 to 110 give powers to investigate an authority's compliance and to require it to produce documents and assistance, which means the paper trail can be summoned. Section 62 establishes a centralised public debarment list: a listing can exclude a supplier from future UK public contracts altogether.
Note what is absent. The Act introduces no civil monetary fines. Enforcement runs through court remedies such as set-aside and damages, automatic suspension when a claim is brought, PCS recommendations and, ultimately, debarment. The risk is not a one-off penalty you can budget for. It is exclusion from the market, which is why poor records that erode your defence are so dangerous.
Building an audit-ready document trail
Practical preparation comes down to making your archive match the regime that now governs it. A few things to watch this year:
- Map your retention to the three-year clock, anchored to either the contract start date or the decision-not-to-award notice, and do not delete early.
- Capture pre-contract communication as it happens. Clarifications and market-engagement notes are easy to lose once a bid closes, yet they are exactly what Section 98 expects.
- Reconcile your internal payment records against the data feeding Payments Compliance and Payment Disclosure notices, because public figures and your own ledger will be read side by side.
- Index everything to your Central Digital Platform supplier ID and the relevant contract reference, so that if Sections 108 to 110 powers are exercised you can retrieve a complete, dated set quickly.
- Treat performance evidence as a living file. With Contract Performance Notices published every 12 months, the moment to gather context on a missed KPI is when it happens.
The shift from PCR 2015 was a shift from being judged on whether you followed the right steps to being judged on what the record shows. Suppliers who keep a trail at least as good as the buyer's will spend 2026 confirming the public data rather than contesting it.
