MAT vs MEAT: why the language shift in the Procurement Act actually matters

If you've read any guidance on public sector tendering written before 2025, you'll have come across the term MEAT (Most Economically Advantageous Tender). Under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, MEAT was the standard against which all bids were evaluated. Buyers had to award to the supplier offering the best combination of price and quality.

The Procurement Act 2023, which came into force in February 2025, replaced MEAT with MAT (Most Advantageous Tender). It's one letter different and easy to dismiss as a rebrand. It isn't.

What changed and why it matters

The word "economically" did a lot of work in the old framework. It anchored the evaluation to economic value: price and quality in its most direct sense. Social value, community benefit, environmental outcomes and wider public interest were grafted onto this framework somewhat awkwardly, always having to justify themselves in economic terms.

MAT removes that anchor. The Most Advantageous Tender is simply the best overall tender, and "best" is now explicitly allowed to include social value, public benefit and wider policy objectives on their own terms, not just as proxies for economic value.

This matters in practice because it changes what buyers are permitted to weight heavily. Under the old rules, a buyer who wanted to give 30% weighting to social value commitments had to argue that social value was economically advantageous. Under the new rules, they can simply state that social value matters to them, weight it accordingly, and evaluate against it directly.

What it means for how you write bids

For SMEs, this is genuinely good news. The shift to MAT creates more room for the kinds of commitments that smaller, locally-rooted businesses can make authentically: community partnerships, local employment and specific volunteer programmes, without having to dress them up as economic arguments.

It also means that buyers who want to use procurement to achieve local or social outcomes have a cleaner legal basis for doing so. You should expect to see more tenders where social value, environmental criteria and public benefit carry meaningful weightings, and where vague generic commitments score poorly against specific evidenced ones.

The practical advice is the same as it's always been: read the award criteria carefully, allocate your effort in proportion to the weightings and write to the criteria rather than to what you wish the criteria were. But the landscape is shifting in a direction that tends to favour suppliers who take their social and community impact seriously.

One caveat

MAT applies to in-scope contracts under the Procurement Act 2023. Local authorities and other contracting authorities have their own frameworks and may not have adopted the new terminology uniformly. If you see MEAT referenced in a recent tender document, it's worth checking whether the buyer is operating under the old or new regime and treating the evaluation criteria as the definitive guide regardless of which term they use.