Most freelance copywriters fish in the same pond: small businesses, startups, the occasional mid-sized marketing department. Familiar water, familiar rates, familiar feast-and-famine cycle.
Meanwhile, the UK public sector spends around £385 billion a year on goods and services. Large companies are restructuring their workforces around external specialists. And in the past few months, the rules of public procurement have been deliberately rewritten to favour businesses exactly like yours.
If you’ve ever dismissed big contracts as the preserve of agencies with bid teams and a Soho postcode, it’s worth looking again.
What’s changed
In March 2026, government departments set individual targets for direct spending with small and medium-sized businesses for the first time. The combined goal: over £7.4 billion a year flowing directly to SMEs by 2028.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has committed to 40% of its procurement spend going directly to SMEs. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport: 33%. The Cabinet Office: 30%. Around half of all departments have set targets above 20%, each one must publish annual progress reports, and departments that fall behind have to set out publicly how they’ll improve.
An “SME” in procurement terms means fewer than 250 staff, with turnover of £44 million or less (or a balance sheet total of £38 million or less). A sole trader qualifies. So does a two-person studio working from a spare room in Stockport.
These latest targets build on the Procurement Act 2023, which came into force in February 2025 and dismantled several of the barriers that prevented small suppliers from competing for big contracts. Public bodies now have a duty to consider the obstacles that prevent small businesses from bidding, and to look at how they can remove them. Buyers are encouraged to break large projects into smaller lots, so a specialist can bid for the piece they’re actually good at rather than pretending to be a full-service agency. Thirty-day payment terms now apply across a broader range of public sector contracts and cascade through supply chains, and public bodies are required to give feedback on final tenders, so a losing bid teaches you something useful.
All of it runs through Find a Tender, the central digital platform where you register once, store your details for multiple bids, and set up alerts for relevant opportunities, free of charge.
The ambitions are clearly well-intentioned, but we must add a caveat here. The Federation of Small Businesses has pointed out that direct SME spend has actually declined since 2022, which is exactly why the targets matter. The policy intent is clear; delivery is what the annual reporting is there to police. Treat this as a door that has been unlocked, not one being held open for you.
Where the work is
The UK Government buys an enormous amount of writing. It just doesn’t call it copywriting.
Instead, look for content design, plain English consultancy, service content for GOV.UK-style digital services, internal communications, public health and behaviour-change campaigns, recruitment communications, and policy documents that need translating into language humans can read. Two of the departments with the most ambitious SME targets, DCMS and the Cabinet Office, also have substantial communications remits. And the procurement rules cover far more than Whitehall: the NHS, local authorities, universities, schools, social housing organisations, police and fire services all buy under the same regime, and many buy writing services regularly at a local level, where competition is thinner.
The private sector tells a parallel story. The UK’s freelance workforce stands at around 2 million people, with an estimated collective turnover of £184 billion, according to IPSE, and 42% of UK firms now include flexible freelancers in their workforce mix. The reasons matter more than the numbers. When Employment Hero surveyed businesses shifting work to contractors, the top drivers were flexibility (49%), avoiding long-term commitment (43%) and access to specialist skills (40%), with cost trailing at 34%. Large companies aren’t hiring freelancers to save money; they’re buying expertise they can’t justify keeping on payroll. A tone of voice specialist, a UX writer, a financial services copywriter with FCA fluency: these are precisely the profiles enterprise clients struggle to recruit permanently.
There’s also a side door into government work that most copywriters never consider: subcontracting. Billions of public money reaches small businesses indirectly through the supply chains of large prime contractors, and primes are now facing scrutiny over whether SME subcontractors are being used meaningfully rather than nominally. The Department for Work and Pensions spells out the three routes in its own action plan: bid directly on advertised contracts, join a framework, or become part of the supply chain as a subcontractor to a larger supplier providing specialised elements of a contract. If a big consultancy holds a transformation contract that includes a content workstream, they need people like you, and they need to be able to prove it.
Where to begin, and what will get in your way
Let’s be honest about the obstacles first, because they’re real.
The biggest is capability, not eligibility. As Enterprise Nation put it bluntly, small firms without dedicated bid teams or procurement expertise risk being shut out of exactly the opportunities designed for them. Tender responses have their own conventions: evaluation criteria, weighted scoring, social value questions, case studies in a prescribed format. None of it is hard for a professional writer, which is the irony. A bid is a persuasion document with a rubric attached. You write persuasion documents for a living. But you do need to learn the bid format, and your first one will take far longer than you expect.
The second obstacle is contract size. Some opportunities will carry insurance levels, turnover thresholds or team capacity requirements a sole trader can’t meet, a barrier the government’s own framework providers acknowledge. The fix is to start where requirements are proportionate (local authorities, smaller lots, lower-value contracts) or to partner. Two or three freelancers bidding together as an informal consortium is entirely legitimate, and micro-agencies do it routinely.
The third is patience. Public procurement moves slowly. A pipeline that pays off in eight months is no use if you need invoices out next week, so treat this as a parallel track alongside your existing client work, not a replacement for it.
The practical starting sequence looks like this:
- Register on Find a Tender and set up alerts for terms like “content design”, “copywriting”, “communications support” and “plain English”.
- Read the SME action plan for one or two departments whose work interests you; each plan is published on GOV.UK and tells you exactly how that department intends to engage smaller suppliers, including market engagement events, many run online specifically to reduce cost and travel barriers for small firms
- Write one capability statement (a single page covering who you are, what you specialise in, and evidence you can deliver) so you’re ready when a prime contractor or buyer asks.
- Bid for something small, expect to lose it, and request the feedback you’re now entitled to.
The agencies that dominate public sector communications work aren’t better writers than you. They’re better at procurement, and procurement is a learnable system that has just been redesigned in your favour. The departments have published their targets. The reporting is annual and public. The window is open now, while buyers are actively working to make their numbers.
Somebody is going to win that work. There’s no structural reason it shouldn’t be you.
Sources
- Departmental Small Business Procurement Targets — GOV.UK, 24 March 2026
- Cabinet Office and HM Treasury SME Action Plan 2025–2028 — GOV.UK (includes the Procurement Act SME definition)
- DBT SME Action Plan 2025–2028 — GOV.UK
- DWP SME Action Plan 2025–2028 — GOV.UK
- The Procurement Act 2023 – A Short Guide for Suppliers — Cabinet Office (PDF)
- Transforming Public Procurement — Local Government Association
- Government sets £7.4 billion procurement target with small businesses — Workplace Insight, March 2026
- UK Government departments announce new SME procurement spending targets — DWF, April 2026
- UK Government sets new targets for spending with small businesses — Business News Wales (FSB response), March 2026
- Government sets first-ever departmental SME spending targets — Enterprise Nation, March 2026
- Procurement Act 2023: Overview and Supplier Guidance — Thornton & Lowe
- Essential Guide to the Procurement Act 2023 — Pagabo
- New Procurement Act 2023: key changes and opportunities for suppliers — Open Access Government
- One in four UK businesses turns to freelancers and contractors — The Global Recruiter (Employment Hero research), June 2026
- The UK freelancer landscape in 2026 — Remote Work Europe (citing IPSE data), April 2026
- Freelancers are driving the UK workforce in 2025 — PeoplePerHour (citing Blu Digital)
- Supporting SMEs — EEM (on turnover and threshold barriers)
Editor’s note: thanks to Ayo Abbas for alerting us to the new government procurement rules.