The European Commission has unveiled a wide-ranging overhaul of EU public procurement rules, pitching the reform as both a simplification exercise and a new industrial policy tool designed to steer more of the bloc’s vast public spending towards European firms.
According to the Commission, the proposed Public Procurement Act would merge three existing directives and a patchwork of sector-specific rules into a single regulation, cutting the current maze of legislation from rou...
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ghly 900 pages to about 200. Brussels says the change would reduce administrative burdens and deliver annual savings of about €650 million for public authorities and bidders combined.
The plan sits squarely within Ursula von der Leyen’s broader push in her second term to cut red tape through a series of so-called omnibus reforms. Public procurement is one of the EU’s biggest spending channels, and one French commissioner involved in the proposal described it as public money that should also serve collective goals, comparing it to a yearly recovery plan and saying it was several times larger than the EU budget in spending terms.
At the heart of the reform is a shift away from awarding contracts primarily on the basis of the lowest price. The Commission wants the “best price-quality ratio” to become the standard approach, with quality carrying a minimum weighting of 30 per cent and rising to 50 per cent in labour-intensive contracts. Environmental, social, innovation, security and resilience factors would all count towards that quality assessment.
Public authorities would still be able to rely on price alone, but only where they can justify that quality is already locked in through technical specifications.
The Commission argues that green and social criteria are already allowed under existing rules, but says their use has been patchy across the bloc. Some contracting authorities, it says, have been reluctant to reject the cheapest bid for fear of legal challenge.
The proposal also introduces a stronger “European preference” framework, giving public authorities clearer powers to favour EU goods and services. Under the new rules, they could restrict participation, impose origin requirements and exclude tenders where EU or covered content makes up less than half of the contract’s value.
Brussels says the measure is intended not only to simplify procurement, but also to make it a more deliberate instrument for strengthening European industry, reducing strategic dependencies and responding to cases where access to foreign procurement markets is limited. The reform would also create a single digital procurement marketplace across the EU and trim procedures from five to three, while adding a new innovation procedure for buying solutions not yet available on the market.
Public procurement is central to the functioning of the single market, covering everything from transport and energy infrastructure to schools and hospitals. With the Commission estimating the market at around 15 per cent of EU GDP, the overhaul could have major consequences for how governments spend, and for which companies win access to that spending.
Source: Noah Wire Services
