Five years of data show the changing role of frameworks in procurement

Inside Housing collected data from five of the sector’s leading procurement organisations, and found that the value of new framework contracts awarded reached £8.3bn in 2025-26, up 52% on the previous year. This data represents the anticipated maximum value of contract awards for each framework over its multi-year lifetime, accounting for big jumps from year to year.

Based on projections, those levels are expected to stay high, with the totalled estimates provided by the organisations predicted to surpass £10bn in the 2027-28 financial year.

It is a symbiotic growth, explains Lisa Lynch, chief operating officer at PfH. “As we’ve grown our expertise in certain category areas, more of our members are utilising frameworks because we’ve got the category expertise,” she says.

“Materials, decarbonisation, net zero, fire safety – we’ve got specialists in all of those areas. With everything our members are doing now, they can’t have specialists in all of those areas. So actually, they’re utilising us for our specialism.”

PfH’s ‘spend under management’, meaning the total spend through its frameworks, increased from £300m in 2022 to £550m in 2025, and it expects it to reach £600m this year. Guy Stapleford, head of consultancy at PfH, says work through his team, providing outsourced and on-demand procurement services, also grew by 60% in 2025.

It is not just subject matter specialism clients are looking for, but specialism in procurement itself, explains Lesley Peaty, regional director at the Scottish Procurement Alliance (SPA), part of LHC Procurement Group.

“I think, generally, frameworks have taken off because a lot of the public authority bodies don’t have their own in-house procurement expertise,” she explains. “A lot of the people that we’re dealing with, like at small housing associations, [are] asset managers, so they don’t have the background in procurement.”

Mr Stapleford echoes the point: “I think we’re still seeing that legacy of stretched resource, particularly in housing [organisations] where they don’t have procurement teams. Why wouldn’t you outsource that skill and expertise to someone?”

The Procurement Act only increased that demand: alongside increased flexibility and freedom to negotiate, it brought new requirements for transparency throughout the process. A survey by Procurement Hub, the provider owned by housing association Places for People, found that just one in 10 public sector procurement teams feel confident navigating the act day-to-day, and 27% say it has added extra administrative burden.

“Public sector organisations are navigating what is, let’s face it, an increasingly complex procurement landscape,” says Caroline Compton-James, deputy chief executive of Scape, which provides procurement frameworks across the public sector. “The Procurement Act places far more onus on transparency.”

The five organisations we collected data from awarded framework contracts totalling £9.4bn in 2023-24. Can that be attributed to people rushing to get under the wire before the act’s introduction?

“Oh, absolutely, I don’t think anyone was shy in saying that,” PfH’s Mr Stapleford says. “I think people probably felt a little bit like, ‘Oh my God, why don’t I just do what I know?’”

He adds: “[Public Contracts Regulations] 2015 frameworks are still compliant, they’re still efficient, they still offer a really good solution. But when you’re nervous and when you want that safety and security of something you’ve done before, of course you’re going to default back.”

As many of those contracts awarded pre-act are now approaching the end of their term, they are facing renewal. PfH is currently preparing to publish its “crown jewels”, Ms Lynch says, the sixth iteration of its material framework – supplying goods and services for repairs and maintenance. Last awarded in 2023-24 for £1.4bn, she says “it will be a big one”.

While the Procurement Act doesn’t apply in Scotland, organisations such as SPA must still meet those standards. But, Ms Peaty says, the Scottish government has previously had more stringent procurement regulation, so the reforms aren’t as much of a shift for SPA. Still, she says SPA is always improving its approach.

“More so now than ever, we’re looking at localised supply chains, and community wealth building,” she explains.

SPA breaks down its frameworks into regional lots, and then individual categories, to encourage SMEs. SPA also is increasing its dynamic purchasing system offer, an alternative to traditional frameworks that allows new suppliers to join during the life cycle, with a lower barrier to entry.

“We’ve seen small companies, through our help, move from the dynamic purchasing system to a framework, because they’ve managed to build up their work portfolio to be able to then allow them to apply for a framework, and then going on to win work through that framework.”

R&M boom

Frameworks have also had to adapt to changes in the sector. To look in more detail, Inside Housing cast its data analysis even wider, looking at individual contract data from nine major providers – totalling 130 frameworks with a combined value of more than £37bn.

Analysing these frameworks by sector shows that repairs and maintenance frameworks boomed as housing providers prepared for Awaab’s Law to come into force in England in October 2025. These include a £3.2bn framework from provider EN:Procure for ‘installation, servicing, maintenance and repair works’, a £2.5bn framework from Procure Plus and a £1.4bn framework from Procurement for Housing. (Scroll to the bottom of the article for more detail on the largest frameworks in recent years.)

In the retrofit space, a number of major frameworks were awarded in 2022-23, as the sector in England prepared for Wave 2.1 of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, which awarded £778m to 107 projects by local authorities and housing associations. And then there was another boom in 2024-25, while applications were submitted for Wave 3, which granted £1.29bn to 144 projects.

This response to regulation can throw up challenges, Mr Stapleford from PfH says. “When we had Grenfell, I think everyone went ‘I need something’, and went straight to framework providers who had that ready-made list of suppliers, for speed and ease and compliance, but then those suppliers are getting to capacity very quickly,” he explains.

“And I think we saw the same thing with damp and mould and Awaab’s Law. So that’s the real challenge, making sure that your framework and your supply chain has got the capacity to to cope.”

Scape’s Ms Compton-James says she has seen providers struggle to continue their development plans, with the growing regulation around repairs.

“What we tend to see is... conflicting and competing interests, the need for new build housing, but also at the same time [the need to invest] in their own stock,” she says. “Those do sometimes feel as though they’re competing, because there’s only a finite pot of money.”

She also hears from clients that the “stop-start cycle of funding” hinders their plans to deliver new homes.

It is a sentiment shared by SPA’s Ms Peaty. “The delays in planning combine with the funding not aligning with the actual development opportunities,” she says. “There’s various restrictions and funding not coming in at the right time, across the board – for decarbonisation, retrofit, all kinds of opportunities.”

Homes England hopes to put paid to that with certainty on funding through the new Social and Affordable Homes Programme. But in response, the bidders are expected to provide certainty, too. In his article last month for Inside Housing, Shahi Islam, director of affordable housing at Homes England, said the agency expects partners to have taken into account risks around cost inflation, availability of skills and stability of contractors.

“More so now than ever, we’re looking at localised supply chains, and community wealth building”

“We will look at their back-up plan if a contractor goes bust during the build stage. What plans do they have to secure another contractor, and quickly?” he wrote. 

He added: “The onus is on delivery partners to show us that they have robust measures in place to protect their delivery.”

“We’ve had wars, we’ve had prices and costs going up,” Mr Stapleford says. “And that’s where our category managers are really useful for people, just to give that market sentiment around ‘this is how pricing has changed, or this is what the suppliers are telling us’.”

In the event that a contractor goes into administration, Ms Lynch says PfH will be “handholding” clients through the process. “We come together with the team to understand, where were you in that cycle of the contract? What can we then do to reroute any of that work through another one of our suppliers or contractors?”

Framework providers clearly see the need to capitalise on this new funding – LHC will be awarding £2.4bn to a ‘new build housing construction’ framework and a further £500m for a ‘modern methods of construction new homes’ framework. And with the sector expected to repair, retrofit and build new homes at pace in the coming years, they’ll need all the help they can get.

Explore the table to see the largest frameworks of recent years.

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