The changes to the public contract directives and the story they tell about how EU law works

Abstract

The new rules for public procurements and concessions were published early in 2014.The reform process laid bare the different preferences of and the consequent tensions among the different actors of legislation. The result are provisions which are innovative in many respects, even where the rationale of the law is the same, but also very complex, and at times obscure, making this area even more technical that it already was. This paper gives an introduction to the most relevant novelties in the law, at the same time, it highlights and discusses a number of issues in the law making process and problematic areas in the substantive rules enacted. The article aims not to describe all the new provisions in detail, but to analyse rather closely specific aspects in order to help understand, and interpret, EU public contract law.

Towards socially responsible public procurement

“…Compared with the UK, mainland Europe was somewhat late in converting to the neoliberal creed. 12 This allowed the very first sustainable public procurement cases to concern social aspects. Bentjies is still rightly recalled as having given birth to sustainable public procurement in Europe.…”

“…The case is still relevant for socially responsible public procurement in that it laid down a number of requirements allowing non-economic considerations to be take into account. The Court of Justice held that a contracting authority could take into consideration ecological criteria such 12 Concerning the early phases, see the contributions collected by Arrowsmith and Kunzlik (eds.) [6] and by Caranta and Trybus (eds.)…”

“…23 The focus here is on Directive 2014/24/EU -not merely because this is the measure covering most contractsbut because it is more detailed and its rules might be applied by analogy outside the Directive's scope of application. 23 See Caranta [12]; Semple [24]; Sjåfjell and Wiesbrock (eds.) [25].…”