Evaluating Value: Quality, Cost and Competition in Public Procurement

Introduction

Article 67 of the current directive lets a buyer choose between three ways of identifying the best tender: lowest price alone, a cost-effectiveness approach such as life-cycle costing alone, or the best price-quality ratio combining price with quality criteria¹. All three are equally valid today, and where a buyer does choose the price-quality route, EU law sets no floor on how much weight quality has to carry — a 90/10 split favouring price is as compliant as a 50/50 one. The new proposal closes off two of those three options and puts a hard number under the third.

It is worth being precise about what actually changes here, because the language of "best price-quality ratio" already exists in today's rules and it is easy to assume nothing has moved. What changes is that BPQR stops being one of three equally legitimate choices and becomes the only one, and the discretion buyers currently have over how heavily to weight quality inside that method disappears along with the other two options. A buyer under the current directive who wanted a genuinely price-led award had a straightforward, fully lawful route to it. Under the new proposal, that route no longer exists in the general case — only the narrower path of building quality into the specification instead, which is a different exercise with a different set of risks attached to getting it wrong.

How Quality Will Be Weighted in Contract Awards

Article 98 states plainly that a buyer shall award the contract to the operator offering the best quality for money,…