Public Procurement
After spending most of 2020 commenting on the blog how COVID-related procurement was being carried out in the UK, the logical next step was always going to write a paper about it, particularly on the rules surrounding extremely urgent public procurement under Directive 2014/24/EU. The paper was published
Public Procurement
The yearly report from the Department for Health and Social Care makes for grim reading in what concerns Covid-related procurement, with the headline figure being the loss of £8.7 billion of the £12.1 billion of PPE spent in the financial year of 2020-21. Over half of the loss
Public Procurement
I have posited many times in this blog (and elsewhere) that it is very possible a significant number of contracts awarded without competition in the UK as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are illegal since the provisions of Regulation 32(2)(c) are not fully met. The key issue
Public Procurement
As promised yesterday, here's the second part of the fisking of the UK Government response to the NAO report on public procurement, focused on the "claims" section of its response: “ ” This is, frankly, pure obfuscation by means of mixing up completely different things together in the
Public Procurement
Last week I mentioned here the National Audit Office Report on COVID procurement which painted the UK Government procurement practice in a terrible light. Predictably, the Government responded with a note published on the Cabinet Office website. Said note, unfortunately, constitutes a prime example of a non-response response, that is
Public Procurement
As mentioned earlier in the blog, Portugal decided to change some of the rules regulating the use of the negotiated procedure without prior publication. At the time I warned the changes made a weak system even weaker and prone to abuse. Yesterday I got wind on Twitter of a contract
Public Procurement
Spain’s current public procurement law imposes strong transparency requirements for most contracts below the financial thresholds, restricting the use of non-transparent procedures to contracts value at below €15,000 (services) or €40,000 (works) only. My take is that overall this is a positive step and one that I
Public Procurement
Regulation 32 - Negotiated procedure without prior publication In the previous legal regime the negotiated procedure was divided into procedures with or without publication. The old negotiated procedure with publication has been effectively upgraded to competitive procedure with negotiation we analysed in Regulation 29. In Regulation 32 we can find