When former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta published ‘Much More Than a Market’ in April 2024, public procurement was not the headline. The report was commissioned to chart the future of the EU Single Market, and its scope ran from a “fifth freedom” for research and innovation to a savings and investments union. But buried within it was a section that has since taken on a life of its own: a call to rethink how the EU’s contracting authorities spend public money.
Two years on, with the European Commission now working towards a formal legislative proposal, it’s worth revisiting what Letta actually proposed, how it has been received, and how much of it is likely to survive the journey from political report to binding law.
What the Letta Report Said About Procurement
Letta’s starting point was blunt, public procurement across the EU represents a vast pool of public spending, and the report treated it as an underused lever for achieving the bloc’s strategic goals rather than a purely administrative function. Much of this framing drew on the European Court of Auditors’ Special Report 28/2023, which had concluded that competition for public contracts had decreased over the decade to 2021, with a rise in direct awards and single-bidder procedures, and only a modest increase in cross-border participation.
From that diagnosis, Letta built several proposals: the most structural was a call to streamline and clarify the objectives of EU procurement law itself: rather than asking contracting authorities to juggle price, sustainability, social value and innovation simultaneously, Letta argued for a smaller, more measurable set of goals. He was also explicit in criticising the continued reliance on lowest price as the default award criterion, arguing it undermines the broader potential of public spending and should be reconsidered in favour of more holistic evaluation. Beyond that, the report touched on joint procurement, particularly drawing lessons from EU-level vaccine purchasing during the pandemic, and floated the idea of moving away from Directives (which require national transposition) towards a Regulation that would apply uniformly across all 27 Member States.
The report also leaned into the social dimension of procurement, calling for contracts to support the creation of high-quality jobs underpinned by fair wages and collective agreements, and tied public spending to broader goals around the circular economy and SME access.
A Mixed Reception
Reactions split along predictable lines, trade union bodies, including the European Trade Union Confederation, welcomed the social elements, particularly the call to embed collective bargaining conditions into public contracts, though they flagged ongoing concerns about gold-plating restrictions and the durability of these proposals through the legislative process. Construction industry groups such as FIEC broadly welcomed measures to boost SME participation but raised reservations about gaps in the report, including its limited treatment of state-owned enterprises from third countries. Circular economy advocates, including RREUSE, praised the emphasis on using procurement to drive demand for reused and recycled goods.
Procurement law commentators were more sceptical of the report’s internal coherence. A frequently echoed critique is that Letta’s call for streamlined, simpler objectives sits awkwardly next to his parallel call to load procurement with more strategic goals around climate, social value and innovation. Pursuing simplification and expanding procurement’s strategic remit pull in different directions, and the report has been criticised for not resolving which one takes priority. Critics have also noted that Letta does not specify what a smaller set of objectives should actually look like in practice, leaving the most consequential proposal largely conceptual. A 2025 analysis from the European Law Blog, reviewing both the Letta and Draghi reports’ procurement content against the Commission’s subsequent publications, concluded that the sustainability ambitions present in the original reports have faded as the reform process has progressed, with strategic autonomy and competitiveness increasingly taking precedence.
Where the EU Reform Process Stands Today
The Letta Report itself has no legal force, but it has fed into the broader debate on the future of EU procurement policy and the ongoing reflection on revising the 2014 procurement directives. The European Commission, under President Ursula von der Leyen, has signalled that procurement reform forms part of its wider competitiveness and Single Market agenda for the current mandate. The European Parliament has also expressed support for reform through recent resolutions calling for a more strategic approach to public procurement, with an emphasis on competitiveness, sustainability, resilience and digitalisation.
On the technical side, the Commission has undertaken an evaluation of the existing procurement framework and has been gathering stakeholder input through consultations to inform a possible revision of the directives. The stated policy direction points towards a more efficient and coherent system, with simplified procedures and a stronger alignment with EU priorities such as green transition, industrial policy and economic security. While the timing of a legislative proposal remains indicative, any reform will need to pass through the ordinary legislative procedure involving both the European Parliament and the Council, followed by national transposition. Based on previous reforms, full implementation across Member States is likely to take several years after adoption.
What This Means in Practice
For contracting authorities and suppliers alike, the direction of travel is reasonably clear even if the legislative text is not yet written. The debate has shifted from whether lowest-price-only procurement should be challenged to how, and from whether sustainability and social criteria belong in procurement to how they should be measured and verified. The Commission’s own evaluation found that average procurement procedure times have lengthened rather than shortened since 2014, which strengthens the case for genuine simplification rather than additional layers of complexity. What is less certain is whether Letta’s central tension, simplify the rules versus expand their strategic ambition, will be resolved in the Commission’s eventual proposal, or whether it will simply be inherited by the negotiators in Parliament and Council. Given how long this process is likely to run, organisations active in public procurement across Europe have time to prepare, but not unlimited time to wait and see.
Lectures de référence et sources complémentaires :
European Commission, Much More Than a Market – Speed, Security, Solidarity (the Letta Report), April 2024: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/ny3j24sm/much-more-than-a-market-report-by-enrico-letta.pdf
Telles.eu, “Looking at the procurement angle of the Letta report”: https://www.telles.eu/looking-at-the-procurement-angle-on-the-letta-report/
European Law Blog, “From Letta, to Draghi, to reforming the public procurement directives: Has sustainability left the building?”: https://www.europeanlawblog.eu/pub/lze046iw
RREUSE, “Letta Report Reaction”: https://rreuse.org/letta-report-reaction-an-encouraging-approach-for-stronger-social-enterprises-and-circular-single-market/
ETUC, “ETUC response to the Letta report”: https://etuc.org/en/document/etuc-response-letta-report-much-more-market
FIEC, “Position on the Letta Report” (PDF): https://www.fiec.eu/application/files/5617/1949/1787/2024-06-27_FIEC_position_on_the_Letta_Report.pdf
