From 24 February 2025 new Procurement Regulations 2024 will go live, which is a delay of 4 months from the previous go-live date of 28 October 2024. All organisations that supply goods or services to West Sussex County Council will need to know about these changes.
Existing procurement regulations will continue to apply for frameworks and contracts that are already in place or are progressing, although from February 2025 new contracts must follow the new procurement regulations.
The new regulations include:
- a new central digital platform which will make bidding easier for suppliers - you can register company details and specific information so that it can be used in bids by all public sector buyers and will be a single place to see all opportunities available
- more opportunities for small businesses and social enterprises so that they can compete for and win public contracts - simplicity and flexibility is key to the design
- more transparency of spending of taxpayers’ money - there are additional stages and levels of detail being introduced to report on activities throughout the procurement and contract life
- simplified bidding processes will make it easier to bid, negotiate and work in partnership with the public sector
The Cabinet Office are leading the Transforming Public Procurement programme and provide guidance, training, videos and bulletin updates, therefore if you haven’t done so, we encourage you to check in to the Transforming Public Procurement pages and subscribe to their mailing list for bulletins.
The Central Digital Platform is a single place for suppliers to find out what opportunities are coming along across the UK that they might wish to bid for, as well as details on contracts that have been let, how contracts are being changed and other useful information.
Additionally, suppliers will use the central digital platform to register, input and then share their commonly used information as part of the procurement.
It will:
- feature a simple registration and identification for both suppliers and buyers
- store suppliers’ core business details that can be used for multiple bids
- enable easy management and updating of core information quickly, and shared easily between suppliers, eSenders (for WSCC, this being ATAMIS) and buyers
- make public procurement opportunities visible making it easier to search at no cost and set up alerts for tenders of interest for suppliers
- allow for procurement noticing throughout the procurement lifecycle
- capture procurement data and eventually allow creation of dashboards to analyse that data
See the Factsheet for more information.