31 October 2023 
Ashley Shelbrooke, HEPA and Project Specialist
Shared with HEPA and BUFDG members on behalf of the Cabinet Office…
We are delighted to announce that the Procurement Bill received Royal Assent on 26 October - officially making the Bill into an Act of Parliament. This followed the Bill’s return to the House of Lords on 25 October for a final session where the outstanding Lords’ amendment was not insisted on.
This is a significant achievement and brings to a close 18 months of Parliamentary debate and scrutiny - leaving us with a strong and reformative Act which will give procurement teams across the whole public sector greater commercial freedom and flexibility to design procurement processes that meet their organisation’s exact needs and drive innovation.
The programme team would like to thank all our colleagues and stakeholders who have contributed right through this process - from the initial sessions to frame the Green Paper through to your consultation responses and ongoing participation in our webinars and engagement events.
You can view the Hansard records of all stages of the Bill’s progress to Royal Assent, here. In due course the official Act itself will be published.
Of course this is not the end of the legislative process. We are planning for the necessary secondary legislation to be laid in Parliament in early 2024, and we anticipate that the new regulations will come into effect from October 2024 after a six month preparation period.
Our focus now turns to implementation and readiness for go-live for the new regime. We will very shortly be publishing further guidance and communications materials - including our official L&D Brochure - to support stakeholders, and in December we will be launching our first L&D product; the Knowledge Drops. Further guidance and training will continue to be published as we progress through the next 12 months. All our materials will be accessible from our Transforming Public Procurement webpages on Gov.uk so please do continue to regularly check in.
