Regulated procurement | UK Regulatory Outlook September 2026

Cabinet Office publishes PPN 026 introducing new streamlined social value model

Following the change in government leadership over the summer, the Cabinet Office has published Procurement Policy Note 026 (PPN 026), introducing a new, streamlined social value model for central government procurement, applying to in-scope procurements commenced on or after 1 January 2027.

In-scope public authorities are encouraged to transition to the new model immediately, but may apply the previous social value model during this transition period if using the new model would require disproportionate resources or invalidate previous market engagement activities. Associated guidance, including sub-criteria and a list of community programmes, is expected in the autumn.

PPN 026 applies to central government departments, their executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies, for procurements valued at £1 million or more (inclusive of VAT), excluding overseas delivery contracts and private utilities. It requires a minimum social value weighting of 10% of the total tender score for contracts of £1 million or above, rising to 20% for contracts of £5 million or above, and must set at least one social value KPI for contracts of £5 million or more.

In contrast to the previous model, the new model is reduced to two outcomes: good jobs and skills, with award criteria covering job creation and retention, and fair working conditions and pay, training, in-work progression and building a talent pipeline. The outcomes that have been removed as standalone themes are environmental and net zero outcomes, crime reduction and community safety, workforce health and wellbeing, modern slavery, and resilient and diverse supply chains, representing a significant narrowing of scope as compared to the previous model.

This means that, when it comes to bidding for and winning public sector contracts, there may be strategic value to suppliers in ensuring that their social value initiatives in relation to these two focused outcomes are robust and effective.  Any social value initiatives that do not focus on these outcomes, while of wider merit, are unlikely to be taken into account in the evaluation of public procurements.  

CMA sets out strategic recommendations and calls for urgent action on bid rigging in public procurement

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published two related policy papers on public procurement, noting that the UK government spends around £400 billion a year buying goods, services and infrastructure from the private sector, and that public procurement is increasingly recognised as one of government's most powerful levers to support a stronger, more dynamic and resilient economy.

Public procurement as a policy tool

The first paper, "Public procurement in the national interest: reflections from the CMA" draws on the CMA's work over the past two years on scale-ups, civil engineering, defence and cloud computing services. It identifies five cross-cutting issues limiting the effectiveness of public procurement as a policy tool: a lack of clear objectives and trade-offs; fragmentation weakening public sector purchasing power; misaligned incentives; barriers to entry facing innovative and growing firms; and procurement processes poorly suited to frontier technologies.

The CMA makes five recommendations: stronger system leadership and clearer prioritisation of a narrower set of objectives; "informed devolution" of purchasing decisions, with stronger coordination where different parts of the public sector buy from the same markets; building data infrastructure to support more strategic, market-shaping purchasing decisions; systematically reviewing procurement requirements for their impact on entry, scale-up growth and competition; and creating an innovation procurement framework to ensure frontier and strategically important technologies can be procured with confidence, while preserving competition safeguards.

Rigged bids

The second paper, "Rigged bids, real costs: a case for urgent action on bid rigging in UK public procurement", sets out the CMA's case for urgent, coordinated action against bid rigging. The CMA states that since 2014 it has completed seven bid-rigging cases, imposing more than £129 million in fines on 31 companies, with more than half of these cases involving public procurement. Citing OECD-referenced research, it notes that bid rigging can increase procurement prices by 20% or more, and that studies have also associated procurement collusion with wider harms, including poorer infrastructure safety outcomes and, in some settings, higher hospital mortality rates. Using a conservative assumption that 2% of UK public procurement is affected, the CMA estimates that taxpayers could be overpaying suppliers by between £1 billion and £3.5 billion every year.

The CMA has developed a Bid Rigging Intelligence Tool (BRIT), currently being piloted with government departments, but says it cannot reach its full potential without access to bid-level data at scale, which is not routinely collected or held in machine-readable format in the UK.

It recommends three actions: making tackling bid rigging an explicit public procurement priority, with a clear commitment in the National Procurement Policy Statement and related guidance; scaling cross-public sector bid-rigging screening capability, including mandating collection and retention of bid-level information in machine-readable format; and evaluating implementation transparently by monitoring coverage, leads, referrals, investigations and demonstrable savings, while avoiding disclosure of methods that could help firms evade screening.