GPP Helpdesk Webinar: Promoting decent work and fighting social dumping by means of public procurement

The second 2024 webinar held by the European Commission's GPP Helpdesk took place on the 17th of September. The event, covering the topic of socially responsible public procurement, addressed the respect of the mandatory horizontal social clause enshrined in Article 18.2 of Directive 2014/24/EU. This clause requires Member States (MS) to ensure compliance with applicable environmental, social and labour laws (obligations established by EU law, national law, collective agreements and eight specified core ILO conventions) in the performance of public contracts. Recent research highlighted that this clause is not always respected and/or that there are shortcomings or uncertainty in its application and enforcement. 

In that respect, the webinar presented good practices implemented by national and regional authorities, as well as by some contracting authorities across the European Union (EU).

The webinar featured the following presentations:

• Welcome and short introduction to the horizontal social clause, Valentina Caimi, Project Manager and Senior Expert, AEIDL
• European Commission’s work on strategic procurement and with reference to the horizontal social clause, Anna Lupi, Legal and policy officer, DG Grow, European Commission
• Learning from the experience of different contracting authorities across the EU:
  • Tomas Munoz Caballero, Expert in knowledge management, Social Investigation and Information Service, Federal Public Service, Belgium
  • Ida Van Neck, Legal officer, Agency for Facility Operations of the Government of Flanders, Belgium
  • Mathias Maucher, Independent expert, providing a short overview of the German and Berlin legal framework
  • Juliane Kühnrich, Project management, Competence Centre for Fair Procurement Berlin; Service Agency Communities in One World (Engagement Global)
  • Lisa Dorigatti, Associate Professor, Università Statale of Milan, author of the country report for Italy of the Procurfair project, Italy. This last presentation was given by the host, Valentina Caimi. 

The workshop was facilitated by Valentina Caimi, AEIDL, on behalf of the European Commission.

All presentations and recording can be found at Circabc

Moreover, at the end of the webinar there were questions and answers, which can also be found on circabc.

This event was the second of four webinars of 2024, as part of the European Commission’s Helpdesk service on GPP. The next one will take place on 16 October and it will be on the topic of 'Making an impact: monitoring the outcomes of public procurement'.