In April 2024, Enrico Letta handed EU leaders a report on the future of the Single Market that devoted a full section to public procurement. Twenty-nine months later, on 9 September 2026, the European Commission tabled its answer: a proposed Public Procurement Act, published as COM(2026) 590 final, that would repeal the three 2014 procurement directives and replace them with a single, directly applicable Regulation.
The Commission makes no secret of the lineage, the opening lines of its explanatory memorandum cite the Letta and Draghi reports as the clearest statements of why procurement now matters strategically. Yet a brief is not a bill and comparing the two documents line by line shows where the Commission followed Letta closely, where it chose a softer version of his idea, and where his proposals simply do not appear.
The September text is a proposal, not law, it now enters the ordinary legislative procedure, and the European Parliament and the Council may amend any part of it before adoption.
The brief: what Letta asked for in 2024
Letta placed his procurement proposals under the heading “A more European and more strategic public procurement market”. His starting point was that a fully integrated procurement market was essential to the Union’s strategic goals, and that the existing rules were falling short of that ambition.
His diagnosis was broad, and he criticised the habit of treating the lowest price as the default award criterion, arguing that it worked against quality and against the development of strategic supply in Europe. He noted that small firms and start-ups found tenders extremely difficult to enter, and that cross-border procedures needed simplifying. He also asked for the goals of procurement policy to be streamlined into a smaller set of clear, measurable objectives. Because Member States were gold-plating the EU rules when transposing them, he proposed converting the directives into a Regulation to narrow the room for national divergence. This fitted a wider theme of the report, which urged the institutions to prefer Regulations over directives when writing Single Market law.
He then added more ambitious ideas and suggested a minimum quota of innovation procurement for Member States, supported by dedicated innovation procurement sandboxes. He called for European suppliers to be prioritised in defence purchasing, pointing out that around 80% of European spending in support of Ukraine between 2022 and 2024 had gone on non-European equipment. He also saw procurement as a lever for the social economy, for fair working conditions and for joint purchasing in areas such as health. Elsewhere in the report, in a passage on financing infrastructure, he went further still and argued for a shift away from in-house models towards public-private partnerships and concessions.
The missing side
Some of Letta’s most concrete proposals do not appear in the Public Procurement Act at all. In a few cases they have been moved to other instruments; in others they have been left out. Defence is the most significant gap, Letta’s call to prioritise European suppliers in defence purchasing was one of his sharpest procurement recommendations. The proposal, however, states that it does not interfere with the defence and security procurement regime, which stays outside its scope under Directive 2009/81/EC. It is also without prejudice to the cooperative defence instruments SAFE and EDIRPA. Whatever happens to European preference in defence will be decided elsewhere.
The minimum quota of innovation procurement is also absent, and instead, the proposal offers a new innovation procedure, in which public buyers set out a societal challenge rather than fixed specifications, test and validate solutions, and then purchase the result. Research and development service contracts, including pre-commercial procurement, are excluded from the Act and handed to a separate European Innovation Act proposed the same day. Regulatory sandboxes, which Letta wanted for innovation procurement, have been addressed through a proposed Council Recommendation, a non-binding instrument, rather than through procurement law.
The proposal keeps the existing exclusions for contracts awarded to entities controlled by public buyers and for public-public cooperation, and expressly leaves Member States free to adopt stricter national rules on them. Joint procurement in health also stays where it was, under the EU’s existing crisis instruments, which the proposal leaves unaffected.
What happens next
The proposal now goes to the European Parliament and the Council under the ordinary legislative procedure. There is no fixed deadline for a first reading, so the timing of adoption is uncertain. Once adopted and published, the Regulation would apply two years later, to give public buyers and suppliers time to adapt. Until then, the 2014 directives and the national laws that transpose them continue to govern procurement.
In its 2025 resolution on public procurement, the Parliament had already called for a more strategic, simpler and more competitive framework. In the Commission’s consultation, more than 80% of respondents across all groups supported prioritising European goods and services in strategic sectors. That suggests the voluntary model of European preference and the comply-or-explain approach to quality could both come under pressure to be tightened, while others will argue for more flexibility. Letta set the direction: one Regulation, less weight on price, easier access for smaller firms, and procurement used deliberately in Europe’s strategic interest. The Commission adopted that direction but drew back from his firmer mechanisms, choosing permissions over mandates and leaving defence and innovation quotas to other files. Whether the final law ends up closer to the brief or to the September text is now for the co-legislators to decide.
Background Reading and Additional Sources:
Enrico Letta, Much more than a market – Speed, Security, Solidarity (April 2024): https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/ny3j24sm/much-more-than-a-market-report-by-enrico-letta.pdf
European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation on public contracts and concessions (Public Procurement Act), COM(2026) 590 final, 9 September 2026: https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/document/download/59557310-3af0-426d-b6b6-0357b650065f_en
European Parliament resolution on public procurement, P10_TA(2025)0174: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX%3A52025IP0174
European Parliament Legislative Observatory, summary of resolution 2024/2103(INI): https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-document-summary/pdf?id=1841304
European Commission, consultation on the revision of the EU Public Procurement Directives: https://ted.europa.eu/en/provide-your-view-on-the-revision-of-the-eu-public-procurement-directives
Deutsche Sozialversicherung Europavertretung, Public Procurement (September 2026): https://dsv-europa.de/en/news/2026/09/beschaffungswesen.html
