The potential of Public Procurement for Social Economy enterprises

Key points

The EESC:

• points out that access to public procurement is crucial for social economy entities, and stresses the importance of establishing innovative criteria with real, non-market value;
• encourages initiatives such as ‘Buying for social impact’ and ‘We Buy Social EU’, which, over and above knowledge-sharing, improve mutual understanding between public authorities and social economy and local economy players, and calls for the Liège Roadmap to be implemented;
• calls on the Member States and the different levels of government to implement all of the measures and actions in the Recommendation on developing social economy framework conditions in order to help social economy entities access the public procurement market, using proportionate selection criteria, for example, or dividing contracts into lots;
• urges the Commission to launch as soon as possible the EU-wide strategic action plan on public procurement requested by the Council, and calls on the Commission to develop a system for monitoring the roll-out of the action plan’s measures so as to make the plan more effective;
• calls for an extensive evaluation and revision of the European public procurement framework in the new legislative term;
• calls for the contracting authorities within the EU to make better use of preliminary market consultations, reserved contracts and division into lots;
• calls on the Commission to create a dedicated section on ‘socially responsible public procurement’ on the Social Economy Gateway to promote the exchange of knowledge and best practices

For more information please contact the INT Section Secretariat