eurealist.co.uk

The FT Reports that EU legislation is making it harder for local government to outsource tasks to the private sector and is creating a “mountain of red tape”

Ruth Coleman, the chairwoman of the Local Government International Bureau (LGIB), said a “whole raft of ever-encroaching rules” threatened to “drive a wedge between the public and private sectors and to create a mountain of red tape” “The extra hoops that councils and businesses may increasingly be forced to jump through risk slowing down the procurement process, holding up important public works and costing the taxpayer.

Jeremy Smith, secretary-general of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, warned that the stricter regime kept councils from doing their job. “Ever greater intervention in relatively low-level contracts is impinging on the way councils do their business,” he said, adding: “This places yet more constraints on local authorities from providing services in a way which they consider to be in the interests of their area, and undermines the principles of local democracy and local self-government.”

This is about EU procurement rules, which seek to ensure that public contracts are awarded in an open, competitive and pan-European bidding procedure. But the regime’s complexity is unsuitable to smaller, local contracts, and has delayed “the awarding of contracts totalling millions of euros a year”.