Partners & suppliers

Working with us: Procurement at Livv

How we buy goods, works and services – and how to work with us

Livv Housing Group spends money on behalf of our tenants and residents, so we’re open about how we do it. This page explains how our procurement works, what the law requires of us, and how businesses (from national contractors to local sole traders) can get involved.

Our approach to procurement

At Livv Housing Group, we always operate transparent and fully compliant procurement processes in line with procurement regulations. Our procurement decisions are underpinned by fair competition, ensuring that contractors and suppliers are selected on merit to deliver best quality products and services. Demonstrating added value is also a key element of our selection criteria.

Our vision is to embed a collaborative approach to procurement using strategic visibility and planning, supported by business unit led specialism, market intelligence and engagement. We use this to manage risks, relationships and costs and, in doing so, optimise value for money.

That means we:

Plan our buying early, so we go to market at the right time and give suppliers fair notice
Draw on the knowledge of the teams who actually use a service or supply day-to-day, so specifications reflect what’s genuinely needed
Look for resilience in our supply chains, not just the lowest price on the day
Build sustainability and our Modern Slavery commitments into how we buy

The rules we follow

Many of our existing contracts remain in place under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR 2015), the rules that applied when they were procured, and will continue on those terms until they come to an end.

All new procurement we run now, and everything going forward, is carried out under the Procurement Act 2023 (PA23), which came into force in Feb 2025 and replaced PCR 2015 as the current regime. This is the set of rules that suppliers should focus on when working with us.

Under PA23, we:

Run fair, transparent competitions, with contracts awarded to the Most Advantageous Tender against published criteria
Provide bid feedback – unsuccessful suppliers on regulated tenders receive an assessment summary explaining the outcome
Are subject to independent oversight through the government’s Procurement Review Unit, which can investigate compliance concerns

We work with our procurement partner, Cirrus Purchasing Ltd, who manage the day-to-day running of our tenders and publish our opportunities and transparency information on our behalf.

Upcoming opportunities

For many of our above-threshold procurements, we carry out market engagement before we go out to tender. This gives us a chance to learn about the market for a particular requirement, understand what is deliverable within each contract, and shape a specification and process that works.

Where we do run engagement, it will be advertised via a Preliminary Market Engagement Notice on the Gov site Find a Tender, so interested suppliers can see it’s happening and get involved. This might include supplier questionnaires, one-to-one conversations, or an open market engagement event, depending on the requirement.

Taking part in market engagement doesn’t affect your ability to bid later, nor does it give you an advantage in the resulting procurement process. It’s a separate, earlier stage designed to inform how we run the procurement itself.

Current opportunities & how to bid

All live open-competition opportunities above threshold are published on the Gov site Find a Tender.

We run our tenders through ProContract (Proactis) – Suppliers can register on this portal to receive alerts, view opportunity details and submit bids

Not every contract we award goes out as a fresh open advert. Here are some other routes that we use:

Lower-value opportunities: Below the regulated thresholds, may be run as a smaller, more informal exercise rather than through the full tender process
For some requirements, we use an established Framework, DPS or Dynamic Market that Livv has access to
- Further competition among the suppliers already appointed to that framework/DPS won’t appear as a new open advert
- Frameworks do also allow award without competition in some circumstances

Supporting local and small businesses

At Livv Housing Group we are passionate about collaborating with local SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to support community-driven economic growth while generating meaningful social impact.

The Procurement Act 2023 requires that public sector organisations consider the barriers that SMEs may face in procurements. We believe in working with small and local businesses to make a positive difference to our communities, whilst ensuring that contractors and suppliers are selected on merit to deliver quality products and services.

If you’re a local business interested in working with us, or want to talk through about our procurement process before bidding, contact our Procurement Manager: Nikki Williams, nikki.williams@livvhousinggroup.com

Payment terms

PA23 introduced implied 30-day payment terms across the public sector supply chain. In practice, this means:

We pay valid invoices from our direct suppliers within 30 days
The same 30-day term applies down the chain – our suppliers are required to pay their own subcontractors within 30 days too