Thanks to Prof Carina Risvig Hamer, I had the opportunity to participate in the conference ‘EU Public Procurement anno 2025 - Are the rules fit for purpose?’ at the University of Copenhagen.
This was an interesting couple of days with plenty food for thought — but also worryingly reminiscent of discussions already had back in 2011 during the previous round of review of the EU directives (plus ça change).
I think there was a fair amount of support in the room for the position that the issues with the (in)effectiveness of EU procurement law do not stem from the rulebook, but rather from challenges in implementation and organisational and capacity shortcomings. However, this did not pre-empt discussions on how the rulebook could be improved.
My topic was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the need to simplify the aims and goals of competition law (my presentation is available here). This gave me an opportunity to revisit the (old and newer) arguments for stripping procurement of regulatory gatekeeping functions by offloading market-shaping rules and norms to general legislation, not procurement-specific mandatory requirements (eg on sustainability, see also Halonen (2021)).
In short, my conclusions / main points were that, in relation to the increasing use of procurement as a policy delivery tool:
Simplification can only be achieved in a pro-competitive manner if the regulatory burden is placed elsewhere (EU-level legislation applicable across the economy)
Explicitly changing goal/s and principles is likely to only have a marginal effect
Only investment in capacity and development of active market intelligence strategies can start to make a difference in practice