On 27 January 2011, the European Commission launched a public consultation on the modernisation of EU public procurement policy. The consultation is intended to initiate the debate on EU public procurement law with a view to simplifying and updating current rules in order to make award processes easier and more flexible.
In the UK, on 10 December 2010, the Office of Fair Trading announced that it too had launched a study into commissioning and competition in the provision of public services, the aim of which is to provide guidance to policy makers and commissioners of public services on how to take account of competition issues in the procurement of public services.
This imminent study by the OFT is expected to build on early work undertaken by DotEcon in 2004, when we developed a theoretical framework setting out how public procurement may impact on competition, undertook quantitative analysis to identify markets where these effects may be found, and provided the OFT with a number of case studies to exemplify different public procurement situations. Download the report here.