The results published by the European Commission on the evaluation of the impact and effectiveness of EU public procurement legislation shows that the current framework has saved around €20 billions. The responses also reveal that the priority should be given to simplification, improving market access and fostering innovation.

The evaluation found that EU public procurement Directives have helped to establish a culture of transparency and outcome-driven procurement in the EU. In addition, it has triggered competition for public contracts, and generated savings and improvements in the quality of procurement outcomes. Open and competitive public procurement has driven down costs by around 4%, generating savings of approximately €20 billion. This far exceeds the costs generated by the regulatory framework, which are estimated to be €5 billion.

However, the responses also reveals that the priority at the reform should be given to each of the different objectives of the reform with a strong support for simplification, improving market access, notably for SMEs and fostering innovation. There is also a certain consensus that streamlining the procedures and making them more flexible is particularly important and that all actors of the procurement world could greatly benefit from it.

The evaluation shows scope for efforts to strike a better balance between the costs of the regulatory system and the resulting benefits. The average public procurement procedure takes 108 days and costs €28,000 - 3/4 of which is accounted for by the costs of preparing tenders (5.4 tenders received on average) and 1/4 for the contracting public authority. The worst performing Member States take 3 times longer to complete a purchase than the best-performing.

With the evidence collected in the evaluation and the insights obtained from stakeholder consultation, the European Commission is going to prepare its legislative proposals before the end of 2011. The priorities for legislative reform will be debated at a landmark public procurement conference in Brussels on June 30th.