Brussels proposes a Public Procurement Act that makes quality criteria worth at least 30 percent of every award: what suppliers need to know

The European Commission adopted its proposal for a Public Procurement Act on Wednesday 9 September, and the sustainability press caught up with it this week. Public procurement in the EU is worth about EUR 2.5 trillion a year, roughly 15 percent of GDP, spread across transport, energy, infrastructure, health and education. The proposal replaces the three 2014 procurement directives with a single regulation, cuts the number of procedures from five to three, shrinks a rulebook of roughly 900 pages to about 200, and is estimated to save businesses and public authorities EUR 650 million a year in administrative costs. Executive Vice-President Stephane Sejourne presented it as giving public buyers more room to weigh European content while respecting the EU's international commitments.

The part that matters for ESG teams is the award method. Best price quality ratio becomes the standard basis for awarding contracts, and qualitative criteria must carry at least 30 percent of the overall evaluation, rising to at least 50 percent for labour intensive contracts, on a comply or explain basis. The Commission's own diagnosis is blunt: price only awards remain prevalent and the uptake of social, environmental and innovation requirements continues to be limited. The text explicitly enables environmental and climate considerations across a product's lifecycle, circularity and resource efficiency, human rights protection along supply chains, social inclusion and gender equality criteria. It follows the Industrial Accelerator Act of March 2026, which introduced Made in EU and low carbon requirements for public purchasing in cars, steel, aluminium and net zero technologies.

There is also a European preference layer. Public buyers could reject bids where less than half the value comes from the EU or from countries with reciprocal procurement agreements, reserve some tenders for EU and covered country suppliers, and give an advantage at award stage to bids with more European content. That reopens a familiar split among member states, but for suppliers it adds a second dimension to the bid, origin of value alongside environmental and social performance, both of which will need documented evidence rather than assertions.

For mid sized suppliers to the public sector, many of which sit below the CSRD thresholds, the practical effect is that lifecycle carbon, supply chain due diligence and social criteria become conditions of commercial access rather than reporting obligations. The evidence public buyers will ask for overlaps heavily with what ESRS E1 and S1 already require of larger companies, and the gap between what buyers request and what suppliers can produce is exactly where platforms like SOMA operate, collecting the data and the audit trail once and reusing it across tenders. The proposal now goes to the European Parliament and the Council, so the rules are years from applying, but the direction is consistent with CBAM and CSRD: sustainability performance is becoming a prerequisite for winning business in Europe, not just for reporting on it.