Why over-reliance on mandated procurement risks stifling net zero – and repeating lessons from PFI
A strategic crossroads for the education estate
The education estate is entering a period of significant change.
The Department for Education’s Education Estates Strategy, published in February 2026, sets out a ten-year plan for the renewal of schools and colleges across England. At its core is a move towards more proactive estate management, long-term strategic maintenance and renewal, better use of data, resilience and decarbonisation. The strategy recognises the scale and diversity of the estate, with more than 22,000 schools and colleges and approximately 2,800 responsible bodies managing those assets.
That makes the commercial decisions taken over the next decade particularly important.
The Department is right to strengthen governance around public expenditure. Schools and colleges face genuine commercial risks, including inappropriate financing arrangements, unregulated leasing, inconsistent procurement capability and increasing pressure on both capital and revenue budgets.
But there is a risk on the other side of the equation.
If centrally approved procurement frameworks become the default solution to increasingly complex estate requirements, we could inadvertently reduce the commercial agility needed to deliver the very outcomes the education estate now requires.
The issue is not whether procurement frameworks should exist, they should, it’s whether they are becoming the default answer to problems that require greater innovation, local supply-chain engagement and whole-life asset optimisation.
The policy paradox: protecting schools while limiting choice
There is a legitimate case for centralised procurement.
National frameworks can provide assurance, reduce administrative burden, establish consistent standards and provide access to suppliers for organisations that may not have significant procurement expertise of their own. But education estates are not uniform.
A rural primary school in Cornwall does not face the same estate challenges as a multi-campus FE college in Manchester. A Victorian secondary school in an urban environment has very different requirements from a modern academy campus. Building fabric, roof condition, energy infrastructure, local supply chains, planning constraints and future demographic requirements all affect what constitutes an appropriate investment.
Standardisation can improve consistency, but it cannot automatically optimise outcomes.
The strategic challenge is therefore to find the right balance between governance assurance and commercial autonomy.
What the Procurement Act 2023 actually changed
The Procurement Act 2023 did not abolish procurement frameworks. They remain an important commercial tool.
But the Act also introduced mechanisms designed to provide greater flexibility.
Open Frameworks allow supplier bases to be refreshed at defined points during the life of the framework. Dynamic Markets are designed to remain open to new suppliers throughout their operation. The Cabinet Office’s current guidance identifies these mechanisms as particularly relevant to developing markets and situations where new entrants may emerge.
This is highly relevant to education estates.
The market for retrofit, energy management and building technology is developing rapidly. A procurement model designed around a static supplier market can struggle to keep pace with that change.
The wider principles of the Procurement Act are also relevant. The legislation places emphasis on value for money, maximising public benefit, transparency and reducing barriers to SME participation.
The question, therefore, is not whether a centrally established framework is compliant, it’s whether an over-reliance on closed frameworks prevents contracting authorities from making full use of the flexibility that the Act provides.
From lowest cost to most advantageous value
The move from Most Economically Advantageous Tender to Most Advantageous Tender is another important change.
Under the Procurement Act, the contract is awarded to the tender that satisfies the authority’s requirements and best meets its published award criteria. Those criteria can include price and quality alongside wider social and environmental considerations where relevant.
For education estates, this should encourage a more mature approach to procurement.
The question shouldn’t simply be: ‘What is the cheapest solution’?
It should be:
Which solution provides the greatest value over the life of the asset?
A solution that reduces capital expenditure but creates higher energy costs for decades may be inexpensive to procure while being expensive to own.
The same principle applies to retrofit. An intervention that improves energy performance, reduces carbon, extends building life, reduces maintenance requirements and creates local economic value may have a very different whole-life value from one judged principally on its initial capital cost.
Why procurement flexibility matters for decarbonisation
Decarbonising an education estate is not a single construction project.
It is an ongoing programme of investment and optimisation involving technologies that continue to evolve: intelligent building management systems, energy optimisation, heat pumps, battery storage, solar generation, ventilation, lighting and building controls.
The pace of innovation is measured in months and years, while education buildings can remain in use for many decades.
That creates an obvious commercial tension.
A framework established several years ago may not reflect the market that exists today. Smaller specialist suppliers may also find it difficult to enter large national frameworks where qualification requirements are resource intensive and expensive, particularly when opportunities to join are infrequent.
Open Frameworks and Dynamic Markets provide mechanisms to refresh competition and allow new suppliers to participate.
For an estate facing rapid technological change, procurement flexibility is therefore not a nice-to-have. It can be a prerequisite for maintaining value.
The overlooked risk of long-term energy agreements
The same principle applies to privately financed energy projects.
Power Purchase Agreements are increasingly relevant to the education estate. The DfE is currently piloting a PPA model for solar installations, where private finance can fund, install and maintain solar panels while the school or college purchases the electricity generated at an agreed rate.
There are obvious attractions to this model, particularly where capital budgets are constrained.
But the long-term estate implications must be understood before the agreement is signed.
What happens if the roof needs replacing, if the building needs structural strengthening, if the site needs to be extended, or if a major fabric refurbishment changes the way the building is used?
The lesson is not that PPAs are inherently problematic, it’s that energy procurement should sit within a coherent estate strategy.
The contract should support the future of the building, not unintentionally constrain it.
The PFI lesson we should not ignore
The comparison with PFI also needs to be handled carefully.
PFI was a long-term financing and risk allocation model rather than simply a procurement framework. Nevertheless, the experience of PFI provides an important lesson about the consequences of contractual rigidity.
The National Audit Office has identified operational inflexibility as a drawback of PFI and noted that contractual changes can be expensive. Its more recent work on PFI expiry has also highlighted the complexity of managing long-term contracts and the importance of understanding asset condition, contractual rights and future service requirements.
The DfE itself continues to carry long-term PF2 commitments, including arrangements involving 25-year operational periods for schools.
The lesson is not that modern procurement frameworks are equivalent to PFI, it’s that long-term estate decisions must retain sufficient flexibility to accommodate changes in technology, building use, regulation, funding and organisational strategy.
A contract that looks efficient today can become a constraint tomorrow.
Where tier-one delivery models can lose value
There is also a practical question about how much of the value of estate investment reaches the point of delivery.
Large national contractors have an important role. They can provide programme management, financial capacity, governance and delivery infrastructure at a scale that individual schools and trusts may not be able to replicate.
But the delivery chain can become lengthy:
Client > Framework Provider > Tier-One Contractor > Regional Subcontractor > Local Installer.
Each layer can provide value, but each layer can also add cost, management overhead and distance between the organisation commissioning the work and the business delivering it.
In specialist retrofit programmes, the organisations carrying out much of the physical work are often regional SMEs.
A procurement model that enables those businesses to compete more effectively can support competition, local economic value and specialist capability while also aligning with the Procurement Act’s objective of reducing barriers to SME participation.
A better model: the DfE Compliance Gateway
So what might a more balanced approach look like?
It doesn’t mean abandoning national standards or allowing uncontrolled local procurement.
Instead, the DfE could focus more strongly on defining what good procurement and estate investment must achieve, while giving responsible bodies greater freedom over how they achieve it.
The Procurement Act’s Competitive Flexible Procedure already allows contracting authorities to design procurement processes that are appropriate to the requirement and the market. Current Cabinet Office guidance allows for multi-stage processes, negotiation, dialogue, demonstrations, site visits and pilot stages where appropriate.
This creates the possibility of a compliance gateway model.
The DfE establishes the standards, technical requirements and governance expectations, responsible bodies demonstrate that they have met them, the market then competes around the solution.
This would preserve assurance without unnecessarily prescribing the commercial route.
Five strategic shifts
For the education sector, this suggests five practical shifts.
Use frameworks selectively, rather than automatically. A framework should be one available route rather than the assumed answer to every estate requirement.
Expand Open Frameworks and Dynamic Markets where markets are developing rapidly. Retrofit, energy and building technologies are obvious examples.
Evaluate investment on whole-life value. Capital cost is important, but so are energy, maintenance, carbon, resilience, social value and asset life.
Increase regional SME participation. Specialist local and regional businesses can bring capability and economic value that may be diluted through heavily layered procurement models.
Separate governance from supplier selection. The DfE can provide assurance through standards, data, gateways and reporting without necessarily determining which supplier every responsible body should use.
From mandated procurement to assured autonomy
There is actually a strong alignment between this argument and the DfE’s current estate strategy.
The Education Estates Strategy recognises that responsible bodies have local knowledge of their estates and communities. It also sets out a move towards proactive estate management, common standards, better data and long-term strategic maintenance and renewal.
That is the right direction.
The Procurement Act provides the mechanisms for competition, transparency and flexibility. The Education Estates Strategy provides a framework for better estate management. The opportunity now is to make those two agendas work together.
A resilient, sustainable education estate will ultimately depend on informed estate leaders, capable finance teams, reliable data, strong national standards and innovative supply chains capable of responding to local circumstances.
The objective should be assured autonomy.
National standards should protect public value and provide confidence that money is being spent properly. But within those standards, schools and colleges should retain sufficient commercial freedom to procure solutions that work for their buildings, their communities and their long-term estate strategy.
That is how governance becomes an enabler of better estate management, rather than another constraint on it.
Tim Warneford MCIOB is a Partner at Warneford Consulting, advising academy trusts, schools and further education colleges across the UK on strategic estate planning, energy solutions and capital funding.
With extensive experience spanning building surveying, social housing maintenance and national energy-efficiency programmes, Tim works closely with education leaders to develop practical, resilient strategies for estate optimisation, capital investment and sustainability.
He is a regular speaker at industry conferences and contributes to national policy discussions on the future of educational estates and infrastructure.
Contact Tim to talk about your estate, energy costs and investment options
