The Economics of Procurement Reform: Costs, Savings and Implementation

Introduction

Nine parts of this series have covered what changes: the structure, the exclusion grounds, the procedures, European preference, innovation and security, green and social procurement, award criteria, contract modification, and the digital backbone meant to run underneath all of it. This closing part covers the numbers the Commission has attached to that change, the clock now running on when any of it actually applies, and what the whole exercise looks like set against the UK's own reform two years further into its own life.

The Commission's arithmetic

The impact assessment prices the new recurring costs of this proposal at €477 million a year for economic operators and €141 million for public buyers, set against recurring savings of roughly €1 billion a year for operators and €220 million for buyers once the digital ecosystem covered in Part 9 of this series is fully running¹. Translated to a single procedure, the average public buyer saves around 4.4% and the average economic operator around 8.9%; across a procedure attracting 3.3 bidders, that works out to roughly €2,100 in combined savings, a 4.9% reduction¹. Those totals are not evenly spread across the reform. The green, social and quality-criteria changes covered in Parts 6 and 7 carry an estimated €55 million a year in additional cost for public buyers; the procedural and negotiation flexibility covered in Part 3 could add up to €78 million a year if buyers make heavy use of the new negotiation rules; the digital ecosystem itself costs an estimated €18 million a year for…