State of play, main conclusions, outlook

The Commission proposed in December 2011 to simplify public procurement procedures. The European Parliament and Council supported these objectives. The new rules became effective on 17 April 2014. The initiative delivers a modern and effective set of procurement rules, including the creation of a European Single Procurement Document, which is a standardised self-declaration that greatly facilitates participation in procurement procedures.

Every year, over 250 000 public authorities in the EU spend around 14% of GDP on the purchase of services, works and supplies.

To create a level playing field for all businesses across Europe, EU law sets out minimum harmonised public procurement rules. These rules organise the way public authorities and certain public utility operators purchase goods, works and services. They are transposed into national legislation and apply to tenders whose monetary value exceeds a certain amount. For tenders of lower value, national rules apply. Nevertheless, these national rules also have to respect the general principles of EU law.

Estimated savings and benefits

The new Directives make public procurement in Europe more efficient, with smarter rules and more electronic procedures. Authorities that have already made the transition to eProcurement report savings between 5 and 20%. With EU Member States spending yearly more than €1.9 trillion for procurement each 5% saved could return almost €100 billion to the public purse.

Given the complexity of the market and the regulation, the Commission did not estimate the overall savings of its proposal. However, savings stemming from specific policy options and various individual provisions were estimated and can be found in the impact assessment.

Building on the results of the Administrative Burden Reduction Programme (ABR), the follow-up study ABR+ estimated, for the provision related to only the winning bidder providing the original documents of eligibility, a decrease in administrative burden ranging between 29% and 58% in 5 Member States (CY, DE, PT, SK, NL).

In its ongoing evaluation in 2023 the Commission will assess the economic effects of the Directives on the internal market, in particular in terms of factors such as the cross border award of contracts and transaction costs, resulting from the application of the thresholds. The Commission will also submit a report to the European Parliament and to the Council on the review of the functioning of the Directive 2014/23/EU and to assess the economic effects on the internal market of the exclusion of the water sector.

REFIT Platform

In its opinion on the Public Procurement (Ref. XII.19b), the REFIT Platform made several recommendations to improve the practical functioning of the current framework such as recommending that (i) national authorities are encouraged to use the IMI system to extract and validate information; (ii) that the user-friendliness of the TED continues to be improved; (iii) that a helpdesk is being set up by the Commission to provide ex ante and user friendly advice to procuring authorities and that (iv) automatic translation tools are improved to facilitate cross-border public procurement. Regarding suggestions on the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD), the Stakeholder group refers to the adopted Platform opinion XII.19.a on how the ESPD could be improved (see REFIT Scoreboard, Standard Procurement Document). Such recommendations are feeding actions undertaken by the Commission to improve the practical implementation of the new procurement framework.

In a second opinion on Public Procurement (Ref. XII.19.c), the REFIT Platform invited the European Commission to 1) include the “light regime” in the upcoming evaluation of the procurement directives; 2) evaluate whether certain tenders relating to a single individual could be exempted from the tendering process even if exceeding the threshold; 3) further pursue its ongoing initiatives for capacity-building measures and to provide guidance e.g. the planned national workshops.