The Procurement Act came into force a couple of days ago, and it is already being marshalled to deliver on something it probably should not. As horrible as the Greenfell Tower fire was, I don't see how the Procurement Act debarment process can be applied in the terms
Under Directive 2014/24/EU contracting authorities have a suite of procurement procedures to choose from: open and restricted that can be used without any restrictions, competitive dialogue, competitive procedure with negotiation and innovation partnership which require some pre-conditions to be met and the negotiated procedure which is exceptional in
The UK government has finally published the new National Public Procurement Statement which will come into force in conjunction with the Procurement Act 2023 later this month. I am yet to dive into it properly, but it is not a million miles from what I had expected it to be.
"The case for competitive government purchasing is that the long-term impact on the price and quality of goods and services and the price, quality, and process of public works will provide direct benefits to public authorities. But, for each individual public authority, these benefits tend to be opaque, while
Despite ambitious goals back in 2014 and years of development since, the current legal framework has failed to deliver the transformational benefits originally envisioned for electronic procurement. In fact, it has actually become a barrier to meaningful digital innovation in public procurement processes. The Commission's recent initiatives in
"As discussed in chapter 8, developments since the 2000 EU summit in Nice demonstrate a growing desire on the part of powerful member states (France and Germany) to consider specific social objectives more fully in the application of competition policy—for example, by developing policies to bolster individual economic
One of the characteristics that has always puzzled me about public procurement as a process is its hijack to achieve objectives that have nothing do with the act of buying. It simply an easy, convenient and 'free' way to enforce compliance with objectives external to the procurement process.
I decided to update yesterday's table to include also the data for the open and restricted procedures started under Directive 2004/18/EC and 2014/24/EU: I could not find any data for 2014 on TED irrespective of what kind of search options I chose. The competitive
For the last couple of years I have kept a rough track of how the use of the special procedures (ie those that have specific grounds for use) are being used. Here's the table including 2024: And here's the same data in a shiny graph: These
The last big thinking piece I will be writing about the revision of the Directives is about questioning the need for secondary legislation at all in EU public procurement. The reason for that being that successive waves of Directives have failed in opening up the public procurement market so we
Why do we have thresholds in public procurement? Why do they exist? This is an answer I tried to answer a couple of times in the past and was not particularly happy with the result (here and here). In short, we have them today because…we have always had them.
The Commission published yesterday its Competitiveness Compass, providing some details of the political outlook for the Commission in the next year or so. With the upcoming revision of the substantive procurement Directives it is unsurprising that procurement was included in the document. The revision of the Directives gets called out