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Public procurement in the social field in Italy


[25/09/2009]
 
SOLIDAR has been involved in two seminars and a press conference organised by Italian SOLIDAR member LegaCoopBund on Wednesday in Bolzano/Bozen. Both during a workshop with members of LegaCoopBund - social cooperatives active in the fields of social, health, employment and socio-cultural services - and in a seminar involving other social NGOs, as well as public authorities from South Tyrol, challenges stemming from an increased use of public procurement in the social field were discussed.

SOLIDAR's contribution focused on the current legal and policy framework at European level, highlighting the relevant rules of Community law on public procurement and explaining the European Commission's process since 2007 to develop legal guidelines and how to apply them in the field of social and health services of general interest. Most of the time was devoted to an exchange of experiences on the tendering out of social services. Alternative forms of delegating the provision of social services to social cooperatives, welfare associations and commercial providers were also examined.

In summary, we see that public procurement increases transparency and reduces the risk of discriminatory treatment. This positive feature, however, is overshadowed by the fact that public authorities clearly tend to retain lowest price offers at the expense of bids suggesting high quality services. Major risks of implementing public procurement procedures that do not adequately take into account specificities of the services and their users are for example a discontinuity of service provision, insufficient investments in the service infrastructure, the destruction of existing networks at local level and a standardisation of services at the expense of tailor made solutions.
 
Experiences from different Member States also show the negative impacts on the quality of the service and on working conditions as more fixed-term contracts are being offered, salaries are decreasing and qualified staff is being subs tituted. This calls for alternative forms of delegating social services to private providers, such as e.g. negotiated procedures involving public authorities and private providers in a structured exchange on selection criteria, the quality and the price of the services tendered out in a second step.


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