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The overlap between competition law and public procurement regulation is more than just an interface of academic and practical significance. For me, and many others this was the genesis of our involvement in the field of public procurement. In common with many public procurement lawyers of my generation, I came to public procurement from a competition law context. That context is significant because at the time (before any Government Procurement Agreement) the gains to be made from public procurement legislation were seen to be much the same as the gains to be derived from the whole package – the benefits of trading in a larger single market where resources would be better allocated, efficiencies built into the system and so forth. Curiously, given the core place for competition in the building of European legal order up to that point, there was little or no explicit reference to the competition law issues that arose in public procurement in discussions around the new directives. Indeed in 1992/1993 there was still widespread debate about whether competition law had any business interfering in traditional tendering practices. This debate took off following the SPO decision in the Netherlands but was a common topic of discussion in construction law circles beyond the Netherlands. Many arguments continued to be made then and for many years afterwards in the UK and elsewhere that the implementation of a fully competitive market in public sector construction was foolhardy and likely to lead to disastrous consequences.
