EU sets a 30% quality floor

Governments across Europe spend roughly 14–15% of GDP each year buying things: hospital software, bus fleets, cleaning contracts, road repairs (European Parliament, European Commission). Public procurement is where tax money becomes actual services, infrastructure and jobs. Today, most of that money still goes to whoever bids cheapest. On 9 September, the European Commission is expected to propose changing what counts as value for money.

The draft, leaked in Italian and German media, would force public buyers to score quality alongside price and give them tools to favour European-linked suppliers (ANSA, Il Fatto Quotidiano). The proposal is only the start of the lawmaking process. It still needs approval from the European Parliament and the Council, and current tenders remain under existing rules (Vergabevorschriften.de).

One legal detail matters for speed. The Commission is proposing a regulation, not a directive. A directive requires each of the 27 member states to write its own national law to implement it, which can take years. A regulation applies directly everywhere once adopted.

Cheapest-bid buying has been losing, not winning

The case for change is measurable. The European Court of Auditors found that the share of EU public tenders attracting only a single bid rose from 23.5% to 41.8% over the decade to 2021, and the average number of bidders nearly halved, from 5.7 to 3.2 (European Court of Auditors). In 2023, 20 member states still awarded more than half their contracts on price alone (European Parliament).

Workers are where cheap bids often land. The European Parliament cited a finding by the European Labour Authority that price-only tenders increase the risk of undeclared work, because contractors squeeze labour costs to win (European Parliament). The Commission's own 2025 evaluation concluded its existing rules only partly delivered on green and social goals, while cross-border participation stayed limited and data gaps left corruption risks unaddressed (European Commission).

How the scoring would actually work

In a price-only tender, the cheapest compliant bid wins. Under quality-weighted scoring, the buyer sets a formula. Say, 60 points for quality and 40 for price. The best combined score wins.

The leaked draft would require that quality factors — climate performance, labour standards, innovation, security — account for at least 30% of the award score. For labour-intensive contracts like construction, cleaning and security, that floor rises to 50% (Il Fatto Quotidiano, LavoriPubblici). A company competing mainly by cutting wages loses part of its edge. A company with better working conditions or lower whole-life costs could win at a higher sticker price.

The draft also includes a "European preference" tool. It would let public buyers penalise or exclude offers where less than 50% of the value originates in the EU or in countries covered by trade agreements such as the WTO's Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), which includes the US, Japan and Canada but not China (ANSA). In practice, this mostly targets Chinese suppliers in strategic sectors. The EU has already tested this logic: its first measure under the International Procurement Instrument excluded Chinese operators from medical-device tenders, and China immediately retaliated in kind (Crowell).

The split over who gains and who pays

France frames procurement as a strategic weapon (L'Opinion). Italy wants to end the cheapest-bid habit and protect workers. Poland's Solidarność trade union celebrated "the end of the lowest-price dictatorship" (Solidarnosc). Nine smaller and northern member states, led by Czechia, Finland and Sweden, warned in December 2025 that broad European preference could reduce competition and raise prices, and urged the Commission to limit it to specific sectors with a full impact assessment (MarketScreener, Euronews).

Germany's procurement lawyers raise a different worry: municipal offices lack the capacity to draft legally solid quality criteria across climate, labour and innovation claims (Ausschreibungen Staatsanzeiger). That capacity gap is the reform's real vulnerability. Quality scoring only works if buyers can write measurable criteria and verify what bidders promise. Without that, mandatory quality floors risk replacing underpricing with overpromising, and favouring large incumbents who know how to score well on paper.

The evidence is clear that cheapest-price procurement has failed to deliver competition and has created incentives to cut labour costs. Whether mandatory quality scoring fixes those problems depends mostly on whether thousands of contracting authorities across Europe can do something most of them have never been required to do.