Do you know your vertical arrangements from your horizontal arrangements? What about your pipeline notices from your planned procurement notices? Could you tell us the difference between a Competitive Flexible Procedure and a Multi-Stage Procedure?
The Procurement Act 2023 was given royal assent on 26 October 2023 and is expected to come into force by October 2024.
In developing the new Act the Cabinet Office adopted some significant linguistic and stylistic differences from the current, well-known and understood procurement law terms. Clearly, some of the new terminology is adopting existing legislative language already common-place on the face of the statue-book, some of it is political and part of the post-Brexit dividend: putting a new British stamp on procurement jargon, and there are some new concepts altogether that need defining and describing.
Our Procurement Act 2023 jargon buster sets out some of the key terms under the Procurement Act 2023, what they were referred to under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, and in plain language what they are. We hope this will be useful to those new to procurement, as well as experienced practitioners.