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ECEC: New EU Public Procurement Rules Must Recognise the Specific Nature of Engineering Services

Richard Powell  2 min read

The European Council of Engineers Chambers (ECEC) welcomes the European Commission’s proposal for a new EU public procurement framework and its ambition to strengthen quality in public procurement. However, ECEC calls for significant improvements to ensure that the specific nature of engineering and other intellectual services is properly recognised.

The European Council of Engineers Chambers (ECEC) welcomes the European Commission’s proposal for a new EU public procurement framework and its ambition to strengthen quality in public procurement. However, ECEC calls for significant improvements to ensure that the specific nature of engineering and other intellectual services is properly recognised.

Engineering, planning and design services shape Europe’s buildings, infrastructure and public spaces. High-quality outcomes in the built environment require high-quality procurement processes that enable excellent and innovative solutions.

ECEC is particularly concerned about the proposed shift from the current Public Procurement Directives to a directly applicable Regulation. A uniform framework risks lowering quality requirements in Member States that already apply higher standards. ECEC therefore calls for the reform to be based on a strong new Public Procurement Directive rather than a Regulation.

“Engineering services are intellectual services whose outcomes cannot be fully defined in advance. Public procurement rules must reflect this specific nature and ensure that professional competence and quality are meaningfully assessed throughout the procurement process,” said Nina Drazin Lovrec, President of ECEC.

For ECEC, the specific nature of intellectual services is at the heart of the issue. In planning and design, the needs and parameters of a project can be defined in advance, but the actual solution emerges through the creative process. ECEC therefore calls for labour-intensive services to be further divided into intellectual and other services, with procurement procedures specifically adapted to intellectual services and higher quality requirements.

ECEC stresses that “best quality for money” cannot be achieved through the mathematical weighting of award criteria alone. The proposed framework sets a minimum quality weighting of 30% in general and 50% for labour-intensive services. ECEC considers these requirements inadequate for intellectual services such as engineering. Procurement procedures must enable a meaningful assessment of professional competence and quality, while also protecting intellectual engineering and design work during tendering.

ECEC also calls for better SME access to public procurement by making the division of contracts into lots standard practice, ensuring that access requirements are proportionate to the scope and nature of the contract, and reducing documentation requirements.

Quality-based procurement also requires sufficient expertise within contracting authorities. ECEC therefore welcomes the proposed measures to build procurement expertise and provide guidance and best-practice approaches. It also calls for representative professional organisations to have the right to request a review of tender and competition documents, helping to prevent problematic procurement procedures before they create risks for public clients and projects.

As the proposal moves to the European Parliament and the Council, ECEC calls on co-legislators to ensure that the new framework properly reflects the specific nature of engineering and other intellectual services and creates the conditions for genuinely quality-based procurement across Europe.

Read the full ECEC statement

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