The Commission launched last week the PPDS, a service that is expected to aggregate data about public procurement in the EU. In essence it takes the data included in the eForms filled in by contracting authorities and makes it available to anyone. For example, it is possible to check for
Public Procurement
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
publications
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
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
UK
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
UK
As with the other manifestos, the LibDem one includes some policy proposals but in general these are bereft of any level of detail. “Expanding the market for climate-friendly products and services with steadily higher criteria in public procurement policy.” Their first proposal comes with a healthy dollop of hand waving
Public Procurement
The Labour party manifesto is long and detailed, but the key points related to procurement are quite brief and lacking detail. Nonetheless, the overarching question is that it remains to be seen if those Labour proposals can be achieved without amending the Procurement Act, although I imagine it will be
UK General Election 2024
As with the Portuguese general election back in March I will be analysing the manifestos of (some) political parties running in the UK’s general election. I shall cover the Conservatives, Labour, LibDems and Green as the only 4 parties currently with MPs and running in (roughly) the whole of
Public Procurement
The Portuguese government presented last week its 32 point anti-corruption plan. If you remember the coalition’s electoral manifesto, fighting corruption was one of its planks. Four of the 32 proposals are directly connected with public procurement, but the idea of hardening the rules on conflict of interest seems to
Council of the European Union
Two years ago, in June 2022 the Council of the European Union published a set of conclusions on sustainable procurement which were an evolution of a 2020 set of conclusions suggesting the introduction of criteria or targets for sustainable procurement. It would seem that the Council was behind the idea
Public Procurement
The Letta report on the single market (Much more than a market) released yesterday contains some ideas for public procurement, namely achieving higher integration for the public procurement market while realising strategic goals. These are explored in detail in a reasonably sized section called 'A more European and more
Portugal
I mentioned a couple of times in this blog that the 2021 reform to the Portuguese Public Contracts Code implemented some questionable choices under the guise of facilitating the award of contracts to make the most of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. However, until now I had not noticed what