UK Buyers Now Rate Suppliers Publicly, With No Way to Compare

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Since 1 January 2026, a contracting authority covered by the Procurement Act 2023 has had to publish how its suppliers are actually performing on contracts worth more than five million pounds. The duty sits in section 71 of the Procurement Act 2023. At least once every twelve months, and again when the contract ends, the authority assesses the supplier against the indicators it set when it awarded the contract and publishes the result in a contract performance notice. Devolved Welsh authorities work to their own guidance on parts of this.

The rating is not free text. Regulation 39(5) gives five words and the authority picks one: Good, Approaching target, Requires improvement, Inadequate, Other.

My work is value engineering, and we are the people who build the business cases that say what contracts like these will deliver. A published verdict on whether the delivery happened is close to the thing I have argued buyers should hold. So it is worth reading what the government says the verdict is for, and where it is supposed to go.

The notice is written for the next buyer

The Cabinet Office guidance is plain about the audience. It says the contract performance notice “provides transparency to other contracting authorities and the public on supplier performance.”

Other contracting authorities, in other words, and not the one publishing. That authority already knows how the contract is going. The notice exists so the next buyer, running the next competition, can see how a supplier performed for someone else.

The same paragraph says how that is meant to work, and this is the sentence I would put in front of anyone relying on the regime: “Once developed, a centralised contract performance ‘register’ will be populated using the information set out in contract performance notices. Further information on this register will be published in due course.”

The duty commenced in January. The guidance was last updated in July 2026, and the place where a buyer would compare one supplier’s record against another’s is still described in the future tense.

What a buyer can see today, and what it cannot

Inside a single contract the record does join up. The guidance says each notice “will be linked to the previous one in the sequence so that a viewer can track how the contract has been performed over its lifetime.”

That is a chain running down one contract. It does not give a view across suppliers or across authorities. To compare two suppliers today you would have to find their notices yourself, one at a time, and then work out whether the words mean the same thing in both.

They probably do not. The five ratings are fixed, but the indicators being rated are not. Open Contracting Partnership, working through the first year of published data, found that performance metrics in the contract details notice are carried as a free text field, so the data is, in their words, “not standardised and the data is messy.” They also counted how many contracts carried any at all: 4.7 percent across the whole dataset, and 28 percent of contracts above five million pounds, against a duty that generally applies above that threshold.

So a Good in one notice and a Good in another are two authorities’ assessments against two sets of measures that nobody wrote to be read side by side.

The rating does not travel on its own

There is a second thing worth being exact about, because it is easy to assume the opposite.

A poor rating does not follow a supplier into the next competition by itself. The exclusion ground that does bite, Schedule 7 paragraph 12(4), attaches to a notice published because of a breach or a failure to perform under section 71(5). The guidance says so directly: publishing that information gives “a public record of which suppliers are subject to the discretionary exclusion ground.” What that same notice can mean for ending a live contract early is covered in Britain’s New Rights to End Public Contracts Ignore the Results.

An annual KPI assessment is a different thing. A supplier can be rated Requires improvement without that rating, on its own, engaging any of it. The rating’s only route into somebody else’s decision is a buyer who goes and reads it, or the register that has not been built.

And the authority has room before it ever gets there. Where it considers that a supplier’s performance “could not be appropriately assessed” by indicators, the guidance says there is no obligation to publish a performance notice for KPI monitoring. Where indicators exist but nothing was measured in the period, the fifth rating covers it: the KPI guidance says Other could be used, for example, where “no KPI data has been recorded by the contracting authority for that KPI for the relevant reporting period.”

The same gap costs the suppliers who deliver. A Good earned on a well-run contract sits in a notice that the next buyer is unlikely to find, next to measures written for a different contract, and a competitor with a thinner record can still tell that buyer it would have done as well.

What sits with the buyer while the register is pending

None of this makes the regime a bad one. It is more record than UK buyers have ever had, and the first full cycle of annual assessments is only now working through.

But a buyer signing a contract this year has no date to plan the register around, and two parts of the record are already in the buyer’s hands. The first is how the indicators are written, which is settled before award and is the only part of this a buyer can make standard on its own: whether someone who was not in the room can tell what was promised and whether it happened. The second is the evidence of delivery, which the published notice does not carry, because the notice is a rating and the material behind the rating stays in the authority’s own files unless someone keeps it in a form the next procurement team can use. Setting down, before the competition opens, what delivery will mean, how it will be measured and who holds the evidence is what a Request for Value is for.

I wrote in Britain Made Buyers Publish a Verdict on Their Suppliers about what the Act leaves the record to say, and in Most Companies Set Goals for Purchases and Never Check Them about why a result governs only when it comes back to the next decision. The register is where those two were supposed to meet.

Until the register exists, what a rating tells the next buyer depends on what the first buyer wrote down before award.

References: Procurement Act 2023, sections 52 and 71; Procurement Regulations 2024, regulation 39; Cabinet Office, Guidance on Contract Performance Notices (updated 20 July 2026), and Guidance on Key Performance Indicators (updated 20 July 2026); Open Contracting Partnership, “The UK Procurement Act one year on: what does the data tell us?”, 3 March 2026, whose authors disclose a subcontract with the Cabinet Office and the operator of the Find a Tender platform.

Keep reading: ACT II · Chapter 9: The Value Control Loop