Soft launching the joint Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Commentary

As hinted a few times before, Albert and I have been busy setting up a joint Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Commentary over the last six months of so. As a recap, we concluded our "procurement tennis" match in the Summer 2015 and a few months later we got a generous grant from the Society of Legal Scholars Small Projects fund to set up a proper website where we could merge a final* and "authoritative" version of our commentary.

So, without further ado we are (soft) launching today the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Commentary! The reason why we are soft launching it now is that the content is not yet complete. So far we merged the first 24 Regulations and are aiming for releasing the second part (25-73) in early September before finishing at the tail end of October. That will not be the end of the work as this is a live commentary and one that will be updated on a case-by-case approach as required in the future and as time permits!

What we tried to achieve with the Commentary was to provide a clear view of what the law means and the major practical issues we see with each Regulation. By and large both our views are coincidental so merging was mostly an issue of style and avoiding repetition. On the odd topic we disagree on we either took the disagreement out of the commentary (ie, more theoretical arguments such as transparency vs competition) with cross-references to our respective blogposts or if really unavoidable we agree to disagree with a clear note of what each other thinks.

The content on most entries published so has been updated and reflect the alterations introduced by the Public Procurement (Amendments, Repeals and Revocations) Regulations 2016. Most entries hover between 500-1,500 words long but we have a few going close to 3,000. We cross-reference where relevant to appropriate case law and where possible we try to point you towards existing free resources to explore matters further. If we missed any good resources feel free to use the comments section so that we can add them in the future.

The commentary is available with a CC-BY-SA Creative Commons License, so while free to use, attribution to the authors is required. I know a number of you have tried to use our individual blog entries in the past for teaching purposes, you are welcome to continue to do so but our preference is for everyone to use the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Commentary instead.

Finally, a big thank you to the SLS for supporting the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 Commentary.

*By final I mean consolidated. We plan on updating the content from time to time.