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The £1.2bn market you have never heard of, and the rules making it visible

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A university building at the centre of a UK public procurement market, connected to council, NHS and college buyers, with award-notice documents surfacing into visibility.

Earlier this month the University of Essex quietly opened one of the larger public procurement vehicles of the year: a UK-wide dynamic market for energy and utilities, worth up to £1.2 billion across its full scope. Electric vehicle infrastructure, chargepoint supply, installation, operation and back-office, sits inside it as one of twelve categories.

It is worth pausing on, because two things about it are quietly typical of how a lot of public money now moves.

First, a university is running a national market. Under the Procurement Act 2023 any public contracting authority can host a dynamic market that the rest of the public sector buys through, and a university qualifies. Essex is the named authority, but it has appointed a specialist, Dukefield Energy, to build and run it, and it is the successor to a utilities framework the two have operated together since 2022. Essex gets a compliant, ready-made route for its own energy needs; councils, NHS trusts, colleges and other bodies get to buy through it; the operator runs it as a business, funded by a small levy on what suppliers win. One vehicle, many buyers.

Second, and this is the part that has just changed: until recently you could have missed the work flowing through a market like this almost entirely.

The old blind spot

Frameworks and dynamic markets are advertised openly. What happened underneath them often was not. For years a contracting authority could run a mini-competition and award a call-off contract through a framework without publishing any notice that an award had been made. The market was visible; the actual wins beneath it, who got the work and for how much, were frequently invisible. For a supplier trying to read a market, that is a large blind spot: you could see the door, but not who walked through it.

What the Procurement Act 2023 changed

The Act went live on 24 February 2025, and it pulls call-offs into the light. For above-threshold contracts, including those awarded under a framework or a dynamic market, a contracting authority now has to publish a contract award notice before the contract is signed, and a contract details notice once it is. Below that, authorities must publish a below-threshold tender notice for contracts advertised beyond a small group of suppliers, from £12,000 including VAT for central government and £30,000 for everyone else. Larger contracts also carry performance obligations: published key performance indicators, and notices on how the supplier is doing against them. And it all lands in one place, the new Find a Tender central digital platform.

In plain terms: the wins that used to disappear inside frameworks are starting to surface.

A call-off you can already see

The change is not hypothetical. In July 2026, Cardiff University published a contract award for electric vehicles, bought as a call-off under a Welsh Government framework and awarded to FleetEV Limited. It is a modest contract, around £189,000, but it is exactly the kind of award that a couple of years ago could have been made under a framework and never separately published. Now it sits on the public record for anyone to find.

It also shows how far the transparency still has to go. The notice names the framework it was called off from in a single line of free text, and nothing in the structured record links it back to that parent framework. The award is visible; the shape of the market above it still has to be pieced together by hand. That is the direction of travel in miniature: more of the real money surfacing, with the connective tissue between markets and their call-offs still being filled in.

What to expect going forward

The direction is clearly towards more visibility, but it is worth being straight about the limits.

The new award notices bite on above-threshold contracts, so smaller call-offs stay lighter-touch. The rules are still new, and authorities are adapting, so coverage in the first year or two is uneven. And crucially, seeing a call-off award is not the same as knowing which market it came through: nothing yet links a call-off cleanly back to its parent framework, so the shape of who-buys-what-through-which-vehicle still has to be pieced together.

But the trajectory is set. Over the next couple of years, expect the public record to fill in: more award notices under frameworks and dynamic markets, more of the real money made visible, and a single platform to find it on. Markets like Essex's will stop being just a big number in an opening notice; the contracts flowing through them will leave a trail.

Why it matters if you sell into the public sector

If you supply EV charging, or anything else that moves through these vehicles, two practical things follow. Get onto the markets you can join: Essex's is at pre-market engagement now, with responses due by 3 September, and a dynamic market can be joined throughout its term. And watch the call-offs, because the awards that used to be invisible are the clearest signal of where the demand actually is.

Reading that trail, market by market, award by award, is exactly what we built EVTenders to do.

See these markets on EVTenders