Nordic business organisations have spent the past two years pushing Brussels to overhaul the EU’s public procurement rules. A forthcoming European Commission proposal suggests much of that lobbying has landed.
According to Tidningen Näringslivet and Upphandling24, the Commission is expected to present its reform package on 9 September 2026. Ellen Hausel Heldahl, a procurement expert at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) and a member of the Commission’s procurement expert group SEGPP, says the draft reflects positions the Nordic business community has argued for consistently.
“It is clear that several issues the Nordic business organisations have pushed for over the past two years are now reappearing in the Commission’s legislative proposal,” Hausel Heldahl said.
She added that the overall picture is one where the Commission has taken up many Nordic reform ideas on digitalisation, simplification and market dialogue.
Four areas of reform
The push from Nordic industry groups has concentrated on four areas: digitalisation, simplified procedures, intellectual property rights, and closer dialogue between buyers and suppliers before and during a tender process. Here is what each is understood to mean in practice.
Digitalisation
The proposal is expected to introduce an interoperable digital ecosystem for procurement, built on shared data models. A central element is a digital company profile that would let a supplier store its credentials, certificates and other qualifying information once and reuse it across multiple tenders, rather than resubmitting the same documentation for every procurement. This “once only” principle is meant to cut administrative duplication for bidders and, over time, open the door to AI-assisted tools that help both buyers and suppliers manage procurement more efficiently.
Simplified procedures
Rather than the current setup of three separate procurement directives, the reform is expected to consolidate the rules into a single framework. Reports indicate this would be built around two main procedures, both allowing for negotiation between buyer and supplier, replacing today’s eForms based system with something less fragmented. For contracting authorities and bidders who currently have to navigate overlapping directives depending on the type of contract, a single rulebook would mean one set of procedures to learn rather than several.
Market dialogue
Under the proposed rules, dialogue between procuring authorities and the market would become a standard part of the process rather than an exception used only in complex cases. Market consultations, where authorities sound out suppliers before finalising a tender’s requirements, would be actively encouraged. In practice this could mean fewer tenders written in isolation and more specifications shaped by early input from the businesses expected to bid.
Intellectual property rights
On IPR, the direction is that a supplier’s existing intellectual property should stay with the supplier. Contracting authorities would only be entitled to claim the rights strictly necessary to use what they are procuring, rather than broader rights by default. Christina Wainikka is co-authoring a report on the IPR dimension of the reform, commissioned by the European Commission.
What Nordic business groups are wary of
The response from Svenskt Näringsliv is not uncritical. According to Upphandling24, the organisation is concerned about a broader shift toward using procurement as an instrument of industrial policy. It opposes mandatory quality and sustainability requirements being written into procurement law, and it has criticised the idea of a “European preference” that would limit the participation of suppliers from outside the EU.
Those reservations point to the balancing act facing the Commission: Nordic industry wants faster, simpler, less bureaucratic procurement, but not at the cost of new mandatory obligations or protectionist criteria that could work against the same suppliers the simplification is meant to help.
What it means for bidders and procuring authorities
For companies that bid on public contracts, the practical upside of a “once only” digital profile is fewer repeated submissions of the same certificates and financial statements across different tenders. A single, simplified procurement framework would also reduce the work involved in figuring out which of today’s three directives applies to a given contract.
For procuring authorities, more structured market dialogue could mean tenders that better match what suppliers can actually deliver, reducing the number of tenders that fail to attract qualified bids or need to be revised mid-process. Clearer default rules on intellectual property would also remove some of the ambiguity that currently surrounds who owns what once a contract is delivered, particularly in technology and services procurement.
The Commission’s proposal, due 9 September 2026, will need to go through the normal EU legislative process before any of this becomes binding law. Nordic business organisations will be watching closely to see how much of the current draft survives negotiations with member states and the European Parliament.