Public Contracts Regulations 2015 - Regulation 81

Regulation 81 - Composition of the jury

According to Regulation 81, the jury of a design contest covered by Part 8 needs to be exclusively composed of natural persons. Said natural persons need to be "independent" of participants in the contest, leading to the question of what is mean by independent and what kind of incompatibilities are relevant here, other than the ones already mentioned in Regulation 24. I wonder why there is no cross-reference to that Regulation, although technically any Part 8 procedure needs to comply with the requirements of Part 1.

The second paragraph establishes an obligation for a third of the jury members to have the same qualification(s) as required from the contestants. This makes sense but we may encounter problems once multiple qualifications are required. Let's imagine that for a building design contest it is required from the contestants a qualification in both architecture and engineering. This would mean that one third of the jury members needed to have a qualification in architecture and a third as well in engineering. There is nothing to forbid each natural person to accumulate qualifications so in theory a dually qualified architect/engineer would count towards both requirements.

Albert's entry is here where he raises some interesting points about we can easily pass to the wrong side of proportionality with these professional requirements.