In July 2024, Ursula von der Leyen announced in her political guidelines that the European Commission will revise the current rules on public procurement. With the publication of the Clean Industrial Deal on 26 February 2025, the timeline of the revision has been announced: the Commission will make a proposal to revise the Public Procurement Framework in 2026. In preparation for this, the Commission has published a public consultation and a call for evidence on the evaluation of three Directives related to public procurement (Directive 2014/23/EU on the award of concession contracts; Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement; Directive 2014/25/EU on procurement by entities operating in the water, energy, transport and postal services sectors). CECOP welcomes the efforts of the Commission to gather input and revise the public procurement rules.

Cooperatives are people-centred enterprises owned, controlled and run by and for their members, who share equal voting rights and reinvest the profit generated in the enterprise. Cooperatives are locally rooted and are protected by some specific mechanisms against delocalisation. They support, serve, and play a significant role in retaining wealth in their local communities, making them the ideal partners in ensuring European preference when allocating public funds. A significant number of cooperatives in CECOP’s network provide goods or services for public authorities, such as in construction, energy, social services, transport, waste management, education, care, and more. Therefore, public procurement is fundamental for supporting cooperatives, and access to public procurement is vital for cooperative enterprises active in industry and services.

The 2014 revision of the public procurement Directive (Directive 2014/24/EU) brought significant improvements to public procurement rules. The key developments that CECOP had advocated for and welcomed in the revision included awarding contracts to the Most Economically Advantageous Tender, the possibility to divide the contract into lots, the possibility of including social and environmental award criteria, and reserved contracts. Nevertheless, in practice, issues persist. Under the current public procurement rules, cooperatives are often excluded, mainly due to the continued emphasis on the lowest price in public tenders, rather than qualitative criteria, while cooperatives apply higher social standards when it comes to the work conditions, training, etc. It is imperative that the upcoming revision ensures that future public procurement not only creates a level playing field for cooperatives but also embraces the principles of environmentally friendly and socially responsible public procurement.

To improve the public procurement rules, CECOP calls for:

  1. The revision and improvement of the selection criteria to ensure that price is not the deciding factor when awarding contracts
  2. Maintaining the option to reserve contracts (Article 20) and thus facilitate the work integration of disadvantaged persons
  3. Improving the terms of reserved contracts for certain services to ensure continuity of services (Article 77)
  4. Clarifying the rules of grounds for exclusion (Article 57) to avoid uncertainty
  5. Lowering administrative burden to create a level playing field for SMEs
  6. Encouraging the participation of small and medium-sized cooperatives via business consortia
  7. Making price-revision clauses mandatory

The revision of the public procurement rules is a critical initiative. While the 2014 revision made great strides towards ensuring better procurement practices, there is a need to further improve them and guarantee environmentally friendly and socially responsible procurement. By emphasising quality over price, the revised rules will enhance social economy enterprises’, including cooperatives’, access to public procurement.

Read our full position paper here.