Public sector work runs through most QS careers, and the rulebook for it changed more in the last eighteen months than in the previous decade. The Procurement Act 2023's main provisions went live on 24 February 2025 for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, replacing the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 and three sibling regimes. Then it kept moving: new duties commenced in January and April 2026, thresholds changed in January 2026, and the unit that polices it was reorganised in April 2026.
If you advise on public procurement, or you have declared Procurement and Tendering at Level 3, this is the current state of play.
The essentials
Scope. Contracting authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland keeps its own regime for devolved bodies. Procurements started before 24 February 2025, and contracts or frameworks awarded under the old rules, continue under those rules for their lifetime, so most QSs are genuinely running two regimes at once: legacy PCR 2015 frameworks and call-offs alongside new Act procurements. Saying exactly that in an interview signals real exposure.
Procedures. The old menu of restricted, competitive dialogue, negotiation and innovation partnership collapsed into two competitive routes: the open procedure, and the competitive flexible procedure, which the authority designs itself. Direct award survives for defined justifications, with a new discipline attached: a transparency notice must be published before a directly awarded contract is entered into.
Award basis. Contracts are awarded to the most advantageous tender (MAT), which replaced "most economically advantageous tender". The dropped word is the point: authorities can weight public benefit, quality and social value without anchoring everything to economics. Award criteria must be set in advance, relate to the subject matter, and be clear, measurable and proportionate.
Transparency. The Act runs on notices, roughly seventeen of them across the lifecycle, all published through the Find a Tender Service: pipeline notices for big-spending authorities, tender notices, transparency notices before direct awards, contract award and contract details notices, and ongoing performance and payment publications. Contracts over £5 million must have a redacted copy published. Unsuccessful bidders now receive assessment summaries showing how their tender scored against the winner's, which has raised the standard of evaluation records and moderation notes, and a standstill of eight working days runs from the contract award notice.
What commenced during 2026
Three duties QSs on public frameworks now see in practice:
- From 1 January 2026: authorities must assess performance against published KPIs at least annually and publish the results. The underlying duty is that contracts over £5 million carry at least three published KPIs, so contract performance reporting is now a public document stream, and being asked to draft or assess KPIs is increasingly QS work.
- From 1 April 2026: authorities must publish individual payments over £30,000 quarterly (not yet commenced for procurement regulated by the Welsh Ministers).
- Payment discipline throughout: a 30-day payment term on valid undisputed invoices is implied into every public contract, cannot be contracted out of, and flows down the supply chain to every tier. A subcontractor on a public job has that statutory entitlement regardless of what the sub-contract says, which sits noticeably tighter than typical construction payment practice.
Thresholds from 1 January 2026
The Act inherited VAT-inclusive threshold arithmetic, and the first biennial uprating landed in January 2026 with most thresholds falling slightly: works at £5,193,000 including VAT, central government goods and services at £135,018, sub-central at £207,720. Lower thresholds pull more contracts into scope. Quote figures with their date and the VAT-inclusive basis, because the pre-2022 convention was net of VAT and comparisons mislead without that caveat.
The machinery behind it
A central debarment list exists, with mandatory and discretionary exclusion categories. As of mid-August 2026 it remains empty of published entries, but checking it is now a compliance step in tender-list assembly, and a complete interview answer covers both facts. The investigating unit changed too: the Cabinet Office's Procurement Review Unit ceased to exist as a business unit on 1 April 2026 when the Government Commercial Agency launched, with the Debarment Review Service formally relaunching under the GCA in June 2026. A candidate who says "the PRU" without knowing about the GCA transfer is one news cycle behind; one who can name the transfer is demonstrating exactly the currency assessors probe.
Two further practice points: authorities must consider dividing procurements into lots with SME accessibility in mind before publishing a tender notice, and the February 2025 National Procurement Policy Statement pushed central government towards published SME spend targets. Packaging strategy is now a documented, challengeable decision, which is QS territory.
Where the questions go
At Level 2: which procedures exist now, what MAT changed, what notices bracket an award, what the current thresholds are and on what VAT basis. At Level 3, the questions become advisory: designing a competitive flexible procedure for a complex works package, advising on lotting strategy against the SME duty, handling a client who wants a direct award and needs to understand the transparency notice, or explaining to a main contractor what the 30-day supply chain payment term does to its sub-contract terms.
As ever, anchor answers in your own projects and date your facts. The regime has moved three times since go-live, and showing you know when things changed is half the credibility. For how current-awareness questioning works in the room, see the interview guide; to check your overall position before you commit to a sitting, the free APC Readiness Check takes three minutes.