Capacity, capability, or both?

I’ve spent the past 18 months working closely with housing association and council procurement teams across the country, and the same conversation keeps coming up. People are stretched. The work has grown, the rules have changed, and the talent pipeline hasn’t kept up. CIPS’ 2025 Salary Guide backs this up: 58% of employers struggled to find the right procurement talent in the previous 12 months, with 61% of public sector employers saying a lack of technical skills or formal training was their biggest hiring challenge. That’s up from 48% the year before.

But here’s what I think gets missed in the “we need more people” conversation. When a procurement team is struggling, the assumption is almost always that it’s a headcount problem. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is. But just as often, the real issue is that the skills, tools and structures around the existing team aren’t set up for the work they’re now being asked to do. Those two things need different solutions, and most organisations aren’t separating them out.

Too much work, not enough hands

For plenty of housing organisations, the capacity challenge is exactly what it looks like. There’s more procurement work than there are people to do it. When I recently surveyed over 40 council and housing association procurement teams, 47.5% told me they still feel inadequately resourced, even though 35% of buying teams have grown since 2025 and 40% expect to expand again this year.

The Procurement Act 2023 has a lot to do with this. The new regime brought a significant jump in administrative obligations. More notices to publish, more reporting duties, more transparency requirements. None of them are unreasonable on their own, but stacked together they eat into time that was already scarce. Teams that were sized for the old regulatory environment are now operating under rules that ask considerably more of them.

What happens next is predictable. The strategic work gets squeezed out. and those people who joined their organisation to do interesting, impactful procurement, market engagement, supplier development, specification design, find themselves buried in procedural tasks instead. The compliance workload fills the diary and everything else gets pushed to the edges.

This hits hardest in smaller housing associations, particularly across Wales, Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland, where there’s often no dedicated procurement function at all. The work lands on finance directors, asset managers or operations leads who are already juggling full workloads. For those organisations, there isn’t really a resourcing gap to close because there’s no procurement function to resource in the first place.

The skills have changed underneath people

The second challenge is harder to see but arguably more important. What it meant to be a good procurement professional five years ago isn’t the same as what it means now. Process knowledge and compliance expertise still matter, but they’ve become the baseline rather than the thing that sets a team apart.

The Procurement Act’s focus on pre-market engagement, transparency and contract lifecycle management asks for a different mix. Commercial negotiation skills. The ability to empathise with suppliers, to understand what drives their pricing and where there’s room to move. Confidence with data, not just pulling a spend report but using it to shape category strategy. And the interpersonal skills to bring internal stakeholders along on decisions they might not instinctively support.

CIPS’ research picks up on this too. Organisational fit has jumped as a hiring challenge for public sector employers, cited by 42% in 2025 compared with 20% the year before. I think this tells a story. Even when candidates have the right qualifications on paper, they may not have the broader commercial and people skills that the role now demands.

AI has complicated things further. Suppliers are using it to write beautifully polished, criteria-aligned bids that can look fantastic on paper without necessarily reflecting what the firm can actually deliver on the ground. Procurement teams now need to be able to see past the perfect narrative, to probe claims, check track records and assess real delivery capacity. That’s a commercial and analytical skill rather than a technical one, and there aren’t enough people in the sector who have it.

Why it matters which problem you’re solving

When a housing organisation treats capacity and capability as the same thing, it tends to reach for the wrong fix. Hiring another procurement officer addresses a headcount shortage, but if the new person has the same skill profile as everyone else on the team, nothing’s really changed. And sending people on a training course is useful for developing skills, but it won’t make a dent if the core problem is just not having enough people to get through the work.

The organisations I see handling this well are the ones that assess both honestly and tackle them separately.

Making space on the capacity side

A few things are working well across the sector right now.

Frameworks and DPS solutions take a significant chunk of procurement workload off internal teams. Every exercise that runs through a compliant framework is one fewer that needs managing from scratch. For a team that’s drowning in process, this is often the most immediate pressure release available. It doesn’t remove oversight, but it cuts the admin burden of specification, advertisement, evaluation and award dramatically.

Specialist support for specific exercises bridges the gap when a team loses someone or faces a procurement that sits outside their usual experience. I’m seeing more housing associations bring in procurement specialists on a project basis, particularly the smaller ones without a dedicated function. What matters is that the specialist doesn’t just deliver the procurement and leave. A good one builds the internal team’s confidence, leaves behind templates and processes, and makes the next exercise easier. It’s worth noting that 21% of the teams I surveyed still haven’t awarded a contract under the new Procurement Act regulations. That’s a confidence gap, and targeted support can close it.

Self-serve toolkits are an underused option. When procurement teams create templates, checklists and clearly defined processes for lower-risk purchases, they empower service managers to handle routine procurement themselves. The point isn’t to hand off responsibility. It’s about building a culture where compliance is baked in by default, so the procurement team can focus their time on the complex, high-value work that actually needs their expertise. As a bonus, it builds commercial awareness across the wider organisation, which pays dividends when it comes to contract management and spend control.

Building capability for the longer term

Practical training on the Procurement Act is the most obvious need, but it has to be the right kind. Not sessions that walk through what the Act says. What people actually need is training that shows them how to apply it in their day-to-day work, with real scenarios and worked examples they can relate to. Too many procurement professionals are defaulting to frameworks procured under the old 2015 regulations because that’s the process they trust. The only way to close that confidence gap is to give people enough structured, hands-on experience with the new procedures that they start to trust their own judgement.

Hiring differently. Housing organisations that only recruit from within the sector tend to end up with teams that all think the same way. Private sector and non-housing public sector procurement professionals often bring strong commercial, analytical and stakeholder management skills that transfer really well into housing. Broadening where you look matters, and so does how you sell the role. Working with HR to present procurement as the strategic, commercially interesting position it’s become, rather than a back-office compliance function, will help attract people who wouldn’t otherwise consider the sector.

Growing your own. CIPS found that 54% of employers are tackling the skills shortage through apprenticeships and graduate schemes, and I think housing associations are well placed to do this. Someone who’s grown up inside a housing organisation understands the sector, the tenants and the operational context in ways that an external hire can take years to pick up. It’s a longer-term play, but paired with mentoring from experienced staff, it’s one of the most effective ways to gradually shift a team’s capability profile.

AI literacy. The teams that’ll do best over the next few years are the ones that know how to use AI productively for things like drafting and data analysis, while also being able to look at an AI-generated supplier submission and see what’s real and what’s just well-assembled prose. You don’t need everyone to become a tech expert. You need awareness, some practical training, and a clear organisational position on where AI fits in the procurement process.

Both problems need solving

Social housing isn’t going to run out of procurement work any time soon. Damp and mould, decarbonisation, Awaab’s Law, building safety, capital programmes: there’s a substantial pipeline stretching well into the next decade, and all of it needs procuring properly. The organisations that deliver well will be the ones whose procurement teams have enough people to manage the volume and the right skills to add strategic value on top.

That won’t happen on its own. It needs housing leaders to take an honest look at where their procurement function actually stands, figure out whether the bottleneck is capacity, capability, or a bit of both, and put the right solutions against each one.

How PfH can help

Procurement consultancy including interim and on-demand procurement support to bridge capacity gaps, hands-on training for your team on applying the Procurement Act, and procurement audits that identify where your function needs strengthening.

Quantum, our spend and contract management platform, gives your team a single view of spend and contract data, reducing the administrative burden and freeing up time for strategic work.

Frameworks and DPS solutions that give your team compliant, ready-to-go routes to market, reducing the procurement workload on stretched internal teams.

By Guy Stapleford, Head of Consultancy Services, PfH This article builds on my earlier piece for Inside Housing, which can be found here

About Guy Stapleford

Guy Stapleford is a commercial procurement specialist with nearly 20 years’ experience in the public sector and housing association sectors.

Currently Head of Consultancy Services at Inprova Group, Guy has also held senior roles as Head of Procurement at Paradigm Housing Group and Bracknell Forest Homes, and Senior Category Manager at Brent Council.

His expertise spans procurement strategy development, contract and supplier management, strategic sourcing, and delivering sustainable cost savings across property, development, and housing operations.

With experience managing procurement portfolios worth over £100m and leading large-scale transformation projects, Guy combines commercial acumen with practical implementation skills, helping organisations embed professional procurement functions and drive measurable efficiencies across their supply chains.