Procurement glossary · The Procurement Act 2023
Competitive flexible procedure
One of the two competitive routes under the Procurement Act 2023, alongside the open procedure. It lets a contracting authority design a procurement to suit the requirement, including stages, negotiation, dialogue and shortlisting, provided the design is published and followed. It replaces the fixed menu of procedures under the old regulations.
What it means in practice
Under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 an authority picked from a fixed list: open, restricted, competitive procedure with negotiation, competitive dialogue, innovation partnership. Each had prescribed stages. The competitive flexible procedure collapses that list into a single route the authority shapes itself.
The freedom is not unlimited. The authority must set out how the procedure will run in the tender notice and associated documents, and must then run it that way. The discipline moved from the regulations to the published design, which is a meaningful shift for bidders: the rules of your specific competition are in your specific tender pack, and there is no longer a standard shape you can assume.
That is the single most important practical change. A bidder who has run twenty restricted procedures cannot assume the twenty-first looks the same. Stages, shortlisting thresholds, whether there is negotiation and on what, whether prototypes or presentations feature, all of it varies by procurement now.
Expect more negotiation and more staged competitions over time, particularly on complex services and anything with a development element. Expect also a period where authorities are cautious and design something that looks very like a restricted procedure, because that is the safe first use of a new freedom.
Where suppliers get caught
Reading the tender pack for the requirement and skipping the procedure description. Under this route the procedure description is where the deadlines, the stages and the shortlisting rules live, and it is genuinely different each time. Bidders who assume a familiar shape miss a stage gate or misjudge how much of their effort belongs at which round.
Common questions
What procedures does the Procurement Act 2023 provide?
Two competitive routes: the open procedure, a single-stage competition open to all, and the competitive flexible procedure, which the authority designs to suit the requirement. The Act also provides for direct award in defined circumstances and for awards under frameworks and dynamic markets.
Can the authority negotiate under the competitive flexible procedure?
Yes, where it has set out that it will and how. Negotiation is one of the things the flexibility permits. What an authority cannot do is introduce a negotiation stage that its published procedure did not provide for.
Related terms
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