Public has published a short impact study about the Procurement Act 2023 in the year and a bit since of its application. It is worth the reading and I will focus on a three key points that sprang to mind. The first point is on the pre-market engagement notices.
Earlier this week Andy Burnham set his stall up to become the UK's next prime-minister, with a speech which included some ideas for public procurement. Unfortunately I couldn't find a copy of the whole thing, but there's a direct quote from the FT:
10 years ago I woke up unsettled at 6am after a restless night, walked down to the living room and turned on the tv. The wind was sucked from me and soon after I walked back up again, hug my baby daughter and cried. This, however, is not a blog
CBS LAW (part of the Business Humanities and Law department) is hiring an Assistant Professor on IT and Internet Law. The advert is here and the deadline for applications is the 31st of August. This position does not require Danish proficiency although that is encouraged of course. I have nothing
Last Saturday yours truly was interviewed for the BBC Radio 4's Moneybox programme about Capita's civil service pension contract. This is a contract they were awarded for 10 years in late 2025 and has had a rough start. In the interview I talk on how these
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to visit Bratislava for the first time and attend a conference organised by UVO. On that trip I also took part on a podcast interview for their procurement series where we talked a lot about "buy European" and third
Earlier this month, 17 member States (plus Norway*) led by Austria, France and Germany have put out a call asking the Commission to abandon its plan to propose a Regulation. The Gang of 18 suggests instead to maintain the status quo of using Directive(s) as the legal form for
The Portuguese government laid down in Parliament yesterday a proposal for a new law governing the powers and operation of the Portuguese Audit Court. After weeks of discussion in the media and sniping from both the government and the president of the Audit Court, the proposal is now finally on
The Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) is barely out as a proposal and it is already creating an impact in China. According to the Financial Times, Beijing is threatening retaliation against the EU for the rules included in the IAA. While I find it deliciously ironic the Chinese commerce ministry is
The Portuguese government approved yesterday a new version of the Public Contracts Code, making good in the promise of reviewing it before the upcoming publication of the Public Procurement Act draft by the European Commission. As there is no official text yet ( we have to wait for the Diario da
Google launched last week a new version of its open source - sorry, open weights - Gemma models. So far they seem to work really well for open weights models and a step up from last year's Gemma 3, as per their report card. They also have nice, long context
Today's post continues to look into the substantive elements of the Infraestruturas de Portugal procurement process for BIA. It will start by discussing open weight models before moving on to OCR (optical character recognition) and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) before concluding with the deployment plans for BIA. It