Part 3: Award of public contracts and procedures Debarment Section 59: Notification of exclusion of supplier
Sections 59-66 provide for the creation and maintenance of a centralised debarment list. This list will sit alongside the exclusions regime as an additional protection against public contracts being awarded to unfit suppliers. As set out in section 57, suppliers which are on the debarment list must be considered as either excluded or excludable by contracting authorities, depending on whether the exclusion ground they meet is mandatory or discretionary.
	Section 59 imposes a duty on contracting authorities to notify the relevant appropriate authority whenever they come to the decision that a supplier is excluded or excludable and take the relevant action to prevent them from participating in a procurement (whether that is disregarding their tender, proposing their replacement as a sub-contractor or associated person, rejecting their application for membership of a dynamic market, or removing them from a dynamic market). This is intended to provide information to an appropriate authority to consider whether to undertake an investigation of the supplier under section 60 and then for a Minister of the Crown to consider whether to add the supplier to the debarment list.
	Subsection (1) lists the scenarios in which the notification duty applies. These are when a contracting authority considers a supplier to be excluded or excludable on the basis of a relevant exclusion ground; and has excluded the supplier, rejected its tender, rejected its application for or removed it from a dynamic market, when the supplier is an intended sub-contractor or associated person and has been replaced or removed at the suggestion of the contracting authority, or where the supplier is on the debarment list because the supplier or a connected person of the supplier poses a threat to national security in relation to particular types of public contracts (see paragraph 35 of Schedule 6).
	Subsection (2) places an obligation on contracting authorities to notify the appropriate authority within 30 days of the relevant event occurring.
	Subsection (3) sets out what the notice must contain. This includes the exclusion ground that the contracting authority has applied and any other information to be specified in regulations made under section 95 (notices, documents and information: regulations and online system).
	Subsections (4) and (5) place an additional obligation on the contracting authority to notify if the supplier has challenged in proceedings under Part 9 an exclusion decision which was notified under this section and to notify the outcome of the challenge within 30 days of commencement or determination of proceedings. This is because the decision on whether to investigate a supplier may be influenced by whether the supplier is challenging its exclusion.
	Subsection (6) defines the terms "exclusion grounds", "relevant exclusion grounds" and "relevant appropriate authority". The appropriate authority is a Minister of the Crown unless the contracting authority is a devolved Welsh authority or a transferred Northern Ireland authority, in which case it is the respective devolved administrations.