Brussels proposes default 70% price cap in EU public tenders, with exceptions

The team that has spent a decade learning to win European tenders on price gets a ceiling it has not had to price in before. Under the proposed default award basis, quality has to carry at least 30% of the score, and 50% on labour-intensive contracts, which leaves price at most 70% and at most 50% respectively ^[5][1]. The floor also has an exit: a buyer may use a different approach if it can explain why ^[5]. That clause carries the implementation, because the person writing the explanation is the same person holding a budget line and a deadline.

What sits inside the 30% is drawn broadly, covering environmental and social factors, innovation, security, resilience and European preference ^[6]. A non-European bid stays admissible; it just has to survive an evaluation where its origin can count against it ^[7]. Beside that sits a blunter power, with the Commission able to restrict access to contracts outright where it finds a third country does not give European suppliers fair access to its own procurement market, or where security of supply requires it ^[13].

The scope question the text does not settle is services. When Made in EU was proposed in March, it reached products such as concrete, aluminium and electric vehicles, and left engineering software, cloud hosting and design tools outside ^[11]. This framework is described as horizontal, which would take it into services, but it does not specifically name cloud or software, and their inclusion would depend on later market access assessments ^[10][12]. Buyers are not waiting for those: Poland announced a sovereignty test for major government technology contracts in June, and the Commission has already split a sovereign cloud contract between four European providers ^[14][15].

Then the money. The €650mn a year of projected administrative savings breaks into €80mn for public buyers and €570mn for companies taking part in tenders ^[9]. About 88% of the relief goes to bidders, roughly seven euros for every euro that reaches a procurement office ^[2]. Buyers take on the new scoring and the justification writing and collect the smaller share. Set against procurement at around 15% of EU GDP, and against Séjourné's own description of hundreds of billions spent annually, the savings figure barely registers next to what this proposal actually decides ^[8][20].

The stated problem is thin competition: fewer bids from companies in other member states and from SMEs, and more tenders arriving with a single bidder ^[18]. A scoring rule changes which documents win, not the number of bidders in the room.

That leaves a cheap test for anyone carrying a European public-sector pipeline: re-scoring the last ten losses with price capped at 70%, and counting a quality claim only where an evaluator could verify it from a document already held. The bids that flip show what a compliance investment is worth; the ones that stay put point to a loss that was about the product itself.