Tenders in European Defence Procurement : selective TED Publication Survey 2015

The European market in defence and security equipment and services is customarily perceived as rather fragmented and closed in the sense that relatively few contracts are awarded across borders. After the transposition of the ‘Defence Directive’ 2009/81/EC into national law and regulations (both union member states and states of the European Economic Area), an understandable interest in evaluating how this development has influenced European procurement related to defence and security has materialised. The intent of the present study by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) has been to monitor developments after the Norwegian transposition date by observing the publication of European procurement related to defence and security. Due to resource limitations, the study is restricted to contract award notices published on Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), the online version of the 'Supplement to the Official Journal' of the EU, for the years 2014 and 2015 by nine nations. The TED database contains publications regarding information as mandated by the EU procurement directives 2004/18/EC and 2009/81/EC. The main findings are summarily itemised below. • The Defence Directive is now commonly in use for defence and security procurement by most nations covered by the study. • The use of the mechanisms / procedures varies among the countries in the study, but the main effort clearly is by the negotiated procedure with publication of a contract notice. The selected nations mostly tend to use such ‘open’ contracting procedures of the directives. In the case of the (mostly exceptional) use of restricted competition, the principal argument for using the exception are concerns regarding technical reasons or reasons concerning exclusive rights. • The bulk of awarded contract value goes to domestic industry. Hence, when it comes to cross-border trade, there seems to be ‘business as usual’. • The negotiated procedure accounts for close to 80 percent of the awarded contract value, while ‘exceptional procedures’, such as the negotiated procedure without a call for competition, amounts to 15 percent. This study provides only limited data for analysis, but it seems appropriate to propose the conjecture that the negotiated procedure as a standard option in Defence Directive contributes to the status quo!