A digital backbone for EU’s procurement vision: Our take on the current regulation draft

The big news this summer in the European procurement world is that a comprehensive draft of the EU’s new Public Procurement Act has been leaked. Lots of great commentary focused on the Buy European push (for example here, here and here). 

The really consequential story is buried a bit deeper: an attempt to give the EU’s public procurement system a real, mandatory data backbone for the first time. This is a big deal and, in my opinion, will transform all the other ambitions that the EU has for procurement. Whether this becomes a living, used data infrastructure or another well-intentioned compliance exercise depends entirely on decisions that haven’t been made yet.

The big shift should be moving away from a slow, paper-based notice architecture to reporting at the point of transaction in procurement, so that data is automatically captured rather than entered in separate systems to generate notices. Put simply, a contract award notice should be populated automatically with key information from the contract, not retyped somewhere else. 

Another key to success will be the EU promoting genuine data use that responds to specific use cases, from improving competition to tracking the reduction of environmental impact, not just data publication. 

We have been here before. eForms, the EU’s current standard for procurement notices, was meant to make procurement data usable across the Union. In practice, most countries did only enough to comply. Few use their own eForms data internally. Even something as basic as looking up who bought what from whom still requires real effort in most Member States. Data mandates without clear use cases that lay out what the benefit will be for users behind it produce exactly that outcome: technically public, practically inert data. Nothing improves data quality more than making it useful to frontline procurement teams. 

What we like

• The ambition: Data infrastructure gets primary legal status with mandatory national and European Union Public Procurement Data Spaces (articles 130-131) that are interoperable, rather than being a non-binding recommendation or a directive Member States can quietly under-implement.
• Lowering thresholds: Below-threshold contracts have to flow into national data spaces from just €10,000 – lower than the €30,000 that we dared to propose earlier this year. 
• Closer integration: mandatory connection replaces today’s voluntary PPDS model, and a digital business-credential tool revives the once-only, reusable-qualification idea that was proposed and then dropped back in 2011.
• The departure from lowest price: a binding floor on quality criteria (at least 30% of award points, 50% for labor-intensive contracts) will help make procurement more strategic and let buyers consider quality over price without fearing litigation from (most often) non-winning bidders. 

Even better if

Most of our concerns are not about what the draft says but about what happens next and how the ambitious vision gets implemented. 

• Keep the ambition. Our main concern is to make sure this ambitious vision is not diluted (as happened with eForms) and to bridge the gap between a good legal text and a system that works on the ground. 
• Data quality: It is really important to think through how to improve data quality by pulling transactional data (captured automatically during procurement procedures), rather than disconnected notices, and validating entries with automatic checks against registers. We should ask for data only once to minimize friction and errors. Much of this will be left to delegated and implementing acts still to come. Putting the data to use nationally and across the European Union with great dashboards and analytics will give publishers real value back, which is the strongest incentive for good data quality. 
• Fill the funding gap: The budget attached to this proposal covers the Commission’s own costs (new staff, central IT) but nothing earmarked for the Member State systems that now will have to meet a €10,000 threshold on their own budgets (Sections 1.5.4–1.5.5 and 1.7 of the Legislative Financial Statement). 
• Stacking complexity vs. streamlining requirements? Security screening, origin rules, sustainability criteria, and quality weighting are all landing on contracting authorities: we should see a commensurate commitment to retire some of the older, complex EU standards. And, of course, the security, sustainability, and quality criteria data could be captured as transactional and published as structured data to ease the capture and monitoring of new requirements. 

In closing, three recommendations

1. Make data use the north star, not data publication. Minimize reporting burden by collecting transactional data, validate data centrally, and return it to the systems that submitted it. Check it automatically against existing registers and thresholds, and attach a real legislative consequence to submitting a correct, complete notice (like the UK did, where there is no standstill period without a clean and complete contract notice). A mandate with no consequence for bad data will be treated like eForms.
2. Invest in adoption as if it were core infrastructure, because it is. The return on investment is going to be huge. Reusable software has to be exceptionally easy to adopt, backed by a genuine helpdesk and technical assistance program. Where older EU standards or systems no longer serve smaller and subnational buyers, the Commission should be willing to kill their darlings – just retire them and not let complexity accumulate forever.
3. Default every open technical choice to transparency unless explained otherwise. So much of what will determine whether this works, what counts as “publicly available,” how award-criteria weightings and derogations get recorded, how security-related exclusions get logged, is still unwritten. The default answer to “should this be structured, public, API-accessible data” should be yes, with the burden of proof on any exception, not the other way around.

Europe does not often get the chance to rewrite its procurement rulebook from first principles. We love the ambition and believe this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally reform how procurement is run across the EU, to move it from a paper-based, compliance-driven chore to an intelligent, user-friendly digital service that boosts European innovation and economic inclusion. We will bring that message to the trilogue and do our best to help the Commission define technical details throughout the process.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash