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Last week I participated in a seminar organised by the European Commission and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on how to develop favourable environments and frameworks for the development of social enterprises.

One session of the seminar was dedicated to public procurement and the opportunities it provides to social enterprises.

Lluis Torrens Mèlich from the Barcelona City Council presented how the city of Barcelona is promoting public procurement to achieve social objectives when the city needs to buy goods, services or works by private parties. The experience of the city of Barcelona is one of the best practices that we gathered in Social Platform’s guide “Public procurement for social progress”.

The city of Barcelona has been able to decrease the number of people who have been unemployed less than 24 months, while the number of people unemployed for more than 24 months has increased. Barcelona has 1,600,000 inhabitants and 18% of them are at risk of poverty.

This is why the city of Barcelona considers the opportunities provided by the new Public Procurement Directive as a useful tool to achieve social policy goals. For example, ‘reserved contracts’ offer concrete opportunities to support the social and professional integration of persons with disabilities and disadvantaged persons. They also allow contracting authorities to launch restricted tenders to non-profit organisations and social enterprises for the award of contracts for social and health services. Another opportunity is presented by ‘social considerations, which allow for social objectives to be achieved. Two other cities in Spain are preparing terms of reference on social clauses of the public procurement rules: Valencia and Madrid. Mr Torrens Mèlich also said that discussions are beginning in Spain on how to raise minimum wage as it is too low and below the poverty line.

I was invited together with Erdmuthe Klaer, from the European Network of Cities and Regions for the Social Economy (REVES), to give a reaction to his contribution. First of all, I congratulated him because Europe needs more enlightened cities such as Barcelona, and we hope that more cities in Europe will follow its example. What is crucial at this stage is whether EU Member States are going to include in their national legislation all the social possibilities offered by the Directive or not. The deadline for converting the Directive into national law (18 April) is fast approaching, so Member States don’t have much time left to decide.

I clarified that the new Directive foresees two types of reserved contract: the first one (which is new) is the possibility to restrict tendering procedures to non-profit organisations and social enterprises for the award of contracts for social and health services – as mentioned by Mr Torrens Mèlich. However, as he said, the Directive’s limitation of this type of contract to three years undermines the continuity of service provision. After the three years the contracting authority has two possibilities: it can launch an open call for tenders, in which the contractor that ran the three-year contract can participate; alternatively, the contracting authority can use other procedures besides public procurement to select the provider in a way that fulfils the principles of transparency, equal treatment and non-discrimination.

The second type of contract restricts tendering procedures to economic operators that state their mission as the social and professional integration of persons with disabilities and disadvantaged people. The scope of the previous Public Procurement Directive only extended to people with disabilities, so this is a positive development.

Finally, I concluded by saying that including quality and social criteria in tendering procedures does not necessarily mean increasing the cost of services. It mainly means evaluating offers for the same contract by weighting different elements besides price or cost. This involves using the same money in different ways.