Procurement in a Nutshell – Pipeline Notice
25th April, 2025
This Nutshell will evaluate the new Pipeline Notice, introduced by the Act, and the commercial impact such publications will have on contracting authorities.
The Procurement Act 2023 (the Act) came into force on 24th February 2025.
The Act, in particular, revoked the following:
- Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR)
- Concession Contracts Regulations 2016
- Utilities Contracts Regulations 2016
What is a Pipeline Notice?
A Pipeline Notice is “a notice that sets out specified information regarding a public contract with an estimated value of more than £2 million in respect of which the contracting authority intends to publish a Tender Notice or Transparency Notice during the reporting period”.
In short, it is a publication outlining the collection of individual procurements that make up a contracting authority’s procurement pipeline over the next reporting period. The ‘reporting period’ is 18 months, commencing on the first day of the financial year in which the notice is published. A Pipeline Notice therefore provides the market with information about current and future public contract opportunities.
A contracting authority is required to publish a Pipeline Notice on the central digital platform where it considers that it will, in the coming financial year, pay more than £100 million under relevant contracts.
The Pipeline Notice must be published within 56 days of the first day of the relevant financial year (Section 93(4)), which means that the first notice will need to be published by 26th May 2025.
Content of a Pipeline Notice
Regulation 15 sets out the minimum information that must be published for each procurement contained in the Pipeline Notice.
The guidance published in December 2024 stated that while a Pipeline Notice is a single notice providing details of all relevant contracts that an authority intends to award during the reporting period, digitally, details will need to be entered in relation to each individual procurement. It was therefore assumed that there would be one Pipeline Notice, covering multiple procurements.
However, the Government have recently published a short guidance note (the UK1 Form) which stated that an individual Pipeline Notice will need to be published for each procurement. As at 25th April 2025, there have been 223 Pipeline Notices published since 1st April 2025, with contracting authorities uploading multiple Pipeline Notices to cover each distinct procurement. Therefore, while the current guidance is contradictory, it seems that in practice a Pipeline Notice is not a single notice collating all intended procurements for that reporting period, but a notice for each public contract opportunity.
What does this mean?
Pipeline Notices intend to enhance market transparency by informing suppliers of upcoming public contract opportunities.
However, for contracting authorities, the requirement to publish Pipeline Notices within 56 days of the new financial year and the need for individual notices for each procurement, despite earlier assumptions of a consolidated publication, will demand a more detailed approach to procurement planning.
Authorities will need to manage multiple notices effectively, ensuring compliance while maintaining an accurate and up-to-date overview of their procurement pipeline. This may involve revisiting internal processes, potentially increasing administrative efforts, and aligning teams across departments to ensure the timely and correct publication of these notices.
For further information please contact Tim Care or Melanie Pears in our Public Sector Team.
Please note that this briefing is designed to be informative, not advisory and represents our understanding of English law and practice as at the date indicated. We would always recommend that you should seek specific guidance on any particular legal issue.
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