What ProcureX Told Us About Where Procurement is Heading
I spent some time at ProcureX recently, and what struck me most wasn’t any single keynote or supplier pitch, but the consistency of the conversation across the whole event.
Look across the agenda, the panels, even the conversations on the stands, and you start to see a very clear direction of travel. Procurement isn’t being talked about as a buying function anymore. It’s being repositioned as a strategic tool to deliver outcomes.
There were five themes that kept coming up again and again.
The first is the Procurement Act and wider reform.
There’s still a lot of focus on what has changed since the new regime came into force and, perhaps more importantly, what hasn’t. The interesting shift is less about compliance mechanics and more about behaviour. Procurement teams are being challenged to move quicker, engage earlier and think more strategically. The language is moving from “did we follow the process?” to “did we achieve the outcome?” That sounds simple, but it fundamentally changes how markets are engaged and how suppliers are evaluated.
Social value and community impact is the strongest thread running through everything.
It’s no longer a bolt-on or a scoring line in a tender. It’s becoming the lens through which projects are judged. The recurring question wasn’t “what’s the cheapest option?” but “what difference will this make locally?” Whether that’s local jobs, healthier communities or wider regeneration, the expectation is that procurement should actively contribute to place. That’s a big shift, and one that feels particularly relevant to the work we do.
AI and digital procurement is clearly accelerating, but in a practical way.
There was plenty of talk about AI, but not in a futuristic sense. The focus is much more grounded. How do we reduce admin? How do we analyse suppliers more effectively? How do we identify risk earlier? It feels like procurement is moving away from being document-heavy and towards being intelligence-led. The tools are there, but the conversation has now moved to how they are actually embedded into day-to-day workflows.
Value for money has evolved into something much more outcome-led.
Given the financial pressures across the public sector, that’s not surprising. What is changing is how value is defined. It’s less about lowest cost and more about what return is delivered over time. Whole-life cost, performance of assets, and preventative investment are all coming into sharper focus. In reality, it’s a recognition that cheap decisions often become expensive ones later on. You can read a little more about our views on affordability here.
And finally, collaboration.
There’s a noticeable shift away from the traditional, linear procurement model towards something more joined-up. Early engagement, co-design and longer-term partnerships were all common themes (and in a shameless plug, something the UK Leisure Framework is build upon). The idea that better outcomes come from working with the market, rather than simply testing it through competition, feels like it’s gaining real traction.
What This Means in Practical Terms
If I had to summarise the whole event in one line, it would be this:
Procurement is moving away from buying things cheaply and compliantly, towards delivering measurable public value.
That has a few immediate implications. Social value isn’t going away; if anything, it’s becoming more central. Digital tools will continue to reshape how procurement teams operate. And outcome-based thinking will increasingly drive decision-making.
For Alliance Leisure, that’s an encouraging place to be. Regeneration, community wellbeing and long-term partnerships have always been at the heart of what we do. In many ways, the procurement conversation is starting to catch up with the language our sector has been using for years.
And that alignment matters. Because if procurement is the route in, then those priorities will increasingly shape what gets delivered on the ground.
And Finally
At the end of a long day in Liverpool at the ProcureX conference, I joined colleagues from Denbighshire Leisure to celebrate at the GO awards. Whilst we didn’t bring home any trophies we were thrilled to be finalists in the Supplier of the Year and Collaborative Procurement Initiative categories.
