The Jonty blog

What's changing in public sector buying

Notes for anyone who sells to the public sector: new rules, policy shifts and what they mean for your next bid.

15 September 2026Insight
Fifty suppliers were shut out of G-Cloud by mistake
A UK startup was rejected from G-Cloud 15, the government's main digital marketplace, because it had raised money on a SAFE and the framework's financial assessment read that as debt. Government was its main customer, so the rejection was close to existential. When it was queried, the answer came back that the whole thing had been a policy oversight. SAFEs should never have been treated that way, and more than fifty other suppliers had been rejected for exactly the same reason. That story comes from a policy paper the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published on 8 September, and it is the paper's whole argument in miniature. The CMA is the competition regulator, not the procurement regulator, which means it cannot compel any of this and can therefore be blunt in a way the Cabinet Office never is. After two years looking at scale-ups, civil engineering, defence and cloud, its conclusion is that procurement keeps turning out to be the thing quietly deciding which firms grow.
8 September 2026Insight
Decoding Public Procurement with the Startup Coalition
Public sector procurement can be confusing for those encountering it for the first time. As well as lots of platforms and rules & regulations, there are also new terms you may not have encountered in other settings. In this article, Startup Coalition partnered with Chris Maitland, CEO & Founder of Jonty, an AI bid manager that helps businesses find, qualify for and win UK public sector contracts, to help decode some of the most common terms you might come across and what you need to know.
2 September 2026Insight
There are two ways to win government work. Most firms are doing neither.
There is a new paper in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management that I think should be read by anyone selling into government. It came out in June, it is open access, and it contains a finding that runs directly against how most businesses organise their bid function. The short version: being a bit proactive about public sector opportunities is worse than not being proactive at all.
6 August 2026Social Value Policy
Miss your social value KPIs now and you can be locked out of the next bid
On Wednesday the Cabinet Office published PPN 026. A procurement policy note is an instruction to government buyers about how to run their tenders. Not a law, but departments have to follow it, so in practice it decides how your bid gets marked. This one replaces the entire social value model from 1 January 2027, and it's the biggest change to how bids are scored since 2020.
4 August 2026Insight
UK Tender Notice Types Explained
UK tender notices are the numbered announcements (UK1 to UK17) that public sector buyers must publish at each stage of a contract's life under the Procurement Act 2023. UK4 is the tender notice itself, the one everyone watches. The other sixteen are where the real advantage sits, because they tell you what's coming, who holds the contract now, how well they're performing, and whether the buyer pays on time.
28 July 2026Procurement Policy
The Chancellor's 'Buy British by design' is illegal
"Buying British not if possible, but by design." That was John Healey in his first speech to Treasury staff, five days into the job. He repeated it to The Sun at the weekend, adding that this would be "a determined drive that you have not seen before from a British government." I want to take the announcement more seriously than a soundbite, and be more precise than a slogan. The interesting question isn't whether the Chancellor means it. It's what he can actually do, and what he can't.
17 July 2026Insight
What Are CPV Codes?
CPV codes classify every UK public sector tender. Learn how they work, why buyers get them wrong, and how to build alerts that don't miss contracts.
6 July 2026Insight
The Palantir story every UK supplier should be reading as a warning (and an opening)
There was a headline doing the rounds last week that a lot of people in public sector sales will have skimmed as a health story or a Westminster story. It is neither. It is a procurement story, and it is one of the clearest signals yet of where the whole market is going.
3 July 2026Insight
What could a Burnham government mean for businesses bidding for public sector contracts?
This morning Sir Keir Starmer stood outside Number 10 and said he'll resign as Labour leader. But the question I care about isn't the Westminster psychodrama. It's this: what would a Burnham premiership do to public sector procurement?
12 June 2026Webinar
The Procurement Act is finally starting to bite
Fifteen months after the Procurement Act went live, the effects are showing up in real tenders. We ran a webinar with public sector sales veteran Matt Spencer on what's changed: seven SME-friendly shifts, new departmental spend targets, and a five-step playbook. Recording included.
28 May 2026AI Policy
Rachel Reeves just made AI a matter of national security
The Chancellor has named AI critical to national security and put an enforcement mechanism behind 'Buy British'. Here's what it means for the people who sell, write bids, and run businesses in the public sector.
28 May 2026Procurement
The UK just quietly rewrote how it buys AI
DSIT's £80m Sovereign AI R&D programme is procurement being used as industrial policy, with founder-friendly IP terms and a clear map of where government AI budgets are heading next.