European Defence and Security Market Strengthened: Deal on Public Contracts

Defence procurement, still essentially a national competence, is boosted by a new directive, seeking to create a genuine single market for defence and security equipment and services adopted by the European Parliament in Strasbourg.>> MEPs voted in favour of the text agreed before with the Council. The challenge has been to put in place a legal framework which will invigorate intra-Community trade in this field and which the Member States can apply without risking their security interests.>> The new legislation establishes a co-ordinated EU procedure for awarding contracts in the fields of defence and security. It should ensure that there is no discrimination between undertakings claiming harm in the context of a procedure for the award of a contract as a result of the distinction made by this Directive between national rules implementing Community law and other national rules.>> The EU's general rules on public procurement, set out in a directive in 2004, take insufficient account of the specificities of the defence sector. This is one reason why building a single market for defence goods is such a laborious task. A new directive, governing only public procurement of defence and security goods, should help to achieve this aim. This market is worth over EUR 90bn and the new directive is important for all EU Member States even though 90% of the production of EU defence equipment is concentrated in five Member States: France, UK, Germany, Italy and Sweden.