Defence
| The reforms introduced by the Procurement Act 2023 (PA23) will be key to the delivery of the UK Government’s ambitions for increasing the scale and pace of defence procurement. These ambitions have been set out following the UK Government’s recent Strategic Defence Review and adoption of a new Defence Industrial Strategy. Whilst many public sector budgets remain restrained, the UK Government has made commitments to increasing core defence spending to spend 2.5% of GDP by 2027 and has pledged to meet the new NATO target to spend 5% of GDP on national security by 2035. |
The PA23 now governs the procurement of defence and security contracts and introduces specific flexibilities for the award of these contracts.
The PA23 replaces the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011, which had implemented in the UK the EU’s defence procurement directive. The PA23 also provides for changes to the separate Single Source Contracts Regulations 2014.
In this Expert Guide we outline how this new regime applies to UK defence procurement and the key changes to the legal framework as it was before.
For more information: see our guide below.
