The Public Procurement Data Space is upon us

The Commission launched last week the PPDS, a service that is expected to aggregate data about public procurement in the EU. In essence it takes the data included in the eForms filled in by contracting authorities and makes it available to anyone. For example, it is possible to check for indicators or visualise the data on specific areas via Data Analytics Dashboards.
As I wrote earlier this year, I have my reservations about the usefulness of the PPDS. This is mostly due to the fact that it is constrained to the data made available via eForms. While for some mandatory fields compliance by contracting authorities is good and thus the data captured by the PPDS is reliable, for others that is not the case. We all know that historically compliance with contract award and contract modifications notices is limited and this will be reflected in the PPDS. Since Member States can extend eForms and certainly some like Ireland have done so to capture fields that are not mandatory, the issue of data completeness will only become more serious as time goes on. This is not to say that having the PPDS is useless, it is not since it improves the access to existing data. What it does not (and cannot) is solving the problem of data completeness. For that, we need significant changes of the legal architecture.