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Links I Liked [Public Procurement]

Pedro Telles

Aug 4, 2015 — 1 min read

1. Portuguese Audit Court unimpressed with PFI/PPP hospital (Portuguese only). The Audit Court analysed the first couple of years of the Loures privately managed hospital in Portugal and did not find significant management improvements in comparison with the best publicly managed hospitals. Its management is better than average for the country, but that is pretty much it. (NB: I was involved in a minor capacity as a lawyer on the original tender procedure back in 2004/2005, which was never concluded. I was not involved in the final one.)

2. Conflict of interest in health procurement in Yorkshire. Very interesting. As Albert mentioned on Twitter, if only the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 were applicable to this case... (his comment; my comment). PS: This situation would be dead easy to solve in Portugal...

3. How technology and a small team is changing procurement in the US. Well, not only procurement but Government in general.

4. Sidney adopts e-ink for some traffic signs. Now that is innovation. Well done. Oh, and Sheffield is creating a SmartLab to find new solutions for problems the city have. Now if only they matched the design/development stage with actual procurement...

5. No water cannons for Boris Johnson. At least he did some savvy procurement by getting the water cannons second hand from Germany. They may be useful as mobile fountains during this scorcher Summer we are having...

6. Speaking of Boris...More on the Roastmaster, sorry Routemaster. Great write up by the Guardian on the Routemaster bus. Some great insight about the difficulties of doing procurement of innovation well and how costs can quickly spiral out of control. I am still puzzled by the assumption that the bus could be sold in other markets and if that happened (it did not) it would have an effect on the price TFL would pay for the bus. Wondering what kind of intellectual property agreement exists between TFL and Wrightbus. In any event, there is no innovation without risk. There is no innovation without failure.

The procurement Directive(s) is(are) getting reviewed

Last week, in her speech on the political guidelines for her new term as Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen announced the following in relation to public procurement: "We must also make better use of public procurement – which accounts for 14% of EU GDP. A 1% efficiency gain in

New publication availabe

I've just uploaded to SSRN my (draft) entry for the forthcoming Elgar Encyclopedia of EU Law. It's on general principles and here's the abstract: "Public procurement regulation within the EU is subject to a mixture of primary, secondary law and case law. This

Portugal's upcoming procurement law(s) review

A flipside of having commented on the recent Portuguese general election party manifestos is that I now have a record of proposals. None paid much attention to procurement and certainly no one suggested a profound revision of the Public Contracts Code. Fast forward a mere 4 months and that is

The UK General Election manifestos procurement promises: Greens

Out of the manifestos analysed, the Green Party one is by far the shortest. It is unsurprising then that there is not much to be found about procurement in it. The only proposal it contains is that they will campaign to bring the Prompt Payment Code into law and debar

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The procurement Directive(s) is(are) getting reviewed

New publication availabe

Portugal's upcoming procurement law(s) review

The UK General Election manifestos procurement promises: Greens