122 days of public procurement tennis!

122 days of public procurement tennis!

From next week onwards myself and Albert Sanchez-Graells from the How to Crack a Nut blog will try something different: we will be commenting on the new Public Contracts Regulation 2015, one section per working day, laying down a few key ideas that we think will be important to understand each section. At the end of each article we will cross-reference our entries so that you can follow the discussion. I am sure we will agree in many articles, but there are a few that I know in advance our views are quite different and should make for some interesting procurement tennis with plenty of volleys and the occasional smash.

We are starting tomorrow with Article 1 and at that pace it should take us 122 days to go over the whole of the whole of the new Public Contracts Regulation 2015. Some days will be boring (after all the Regulations are mostly a copy+paste affair...) but I am looking forward to talk at length about the procedures, framework agreements and contracts below-thresholds. In a weird case of cosmic alignment, Central Government aims for open procedures to last in average 120 working days, so we will not be far off from that metric...

Hat tip goes for our common friend Carina Risvig-Hammer from the University of Southern Denmark for the idea. She did something similar with the draft Danish Procurement Law and over a nice brunch in Copenhagen a few weeks ago I thought it would be something great to do with the new Regulations. Before you ask, we were drinking orange juice at the time.

If you have any topic/idea you would like us to cover, feel free to hit us on the comments.