Planned Procurement Notice

What is a planned procurement notice?

A planned procurement notice is an early public signal that your council intends to buy something and roughly when the full tender will appear. Under the Procurement Act 2023 it replaces the old prior information notice and must be posted on the central digital platform. If you publish the notice between forty days and a year before the tender it counts as a “qualifying” notice, which lets you shorten the later tender window to as little as ten days provided bidders still have enough information to respond properly. For a planning team looking to commission new software this heads up tells suppliers the outline scope, budget and timetable so that even smaller firms have time to prepare.

Putting out a planned procurement notice

The law sets out a checklist of information the notice must carry – things such as the name of the buying authority, estimated value and a summary of what you want to purchase. Your corporate procurement colleagues hold the template and will confirm that every box is ticked, so involve them from the start. Once the notice is live you should only claim the shorter tender period if the proposal you eventually put to market is still recognisably the same. If you later merge your requirement with neighbouring authorities, change the functionality or split the scope, you may need to issue a fresh notice and use the standard tender timescales instead.

Planned procurement notice implications for buying planning software

For planners the practical lesson is timing. Publish only when you have enough detail to be useful – putting out a barebones notice a year in advance helps no one – and keep talking to procurement so you can update or replace the notice if your plans evolve. Used well, a qualifying planned procurement notice can trim weeks from the procurement, letting you move from business case to contract award more quickly while still giving industry a fair chance to compete.