Cooperatives are people-centred enterprises owned, controlled and run by and for their members, who share equal voting rights and reinvest the profit generated in the enterprise. Cooperatives are locally rooted and are protected by specific mechanisms against delocalisation. They support, serve, and play a significant role in retaining wealth in their local communities, making them the ideal partners in ensuring European preference when allocating public funds.

Under the current Public Procurement Directive, industrial and service cooperatives are often left out, for instance because they are mainly SMEs, which often find it difficult to participate in public tenders, or because of the higher environmental/social considerations they apply by nature, which often has a negative impact on winning tenders due to the overwhelming use of price-only awarding. But cooperatives are well-positioned to contribute to achieving the EU’s strategic priorities, including green, innovative and social goals, as well as strengthening the EU’s strategic autonomy. As the Letta report recommends, public procurement must be used to increase both the impact and the market presence of the social economy, the wider family which cooperatives are a part of.

To achieve this, CECOP calls on the Commission to consider the below recommendations:

  1. Lower administrative burden to create a level playing field for small and medium cooperatives
  2. Encourage the participation of small and medium-sized cooperatives via business consortia
  3. Clarify the rules of grounds for exclusion (Article 57) to avoid uncertainty
  4. Make price-revision clauses mandatory
  5. Introduce the Made in EU concept and include cooperatives in it
  6. Provide extra points in the selection criteria for enterprises that retain the value created in the EU
  7. Strengthen the Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) criterion
  8. Introduce mandatory social and environmental considerations
  9. Maintain the option to reserve contracts (Article 20) and thus facilitate the work integration of disadvantaged persons
  10. Improve the terms of reserved contracts for certain services to ensure continuity of services (Article 77)
  11. Provide training for contracting authorities on the social economy
  12. Develop a robust and transparent monitoring system

Read our full response here.