At the Competition and Public Procurement Dialogue hosted by the Berlin Chamber of Architects, the final report of the joint procurement monitoring project was presented. BLOMSTEIN has been working alongside the Berlin Chamber of Architects for many years to advocate for a more competition-friendly approach to the procurement of architectural and planning services in Berlin.
Over the past four years, BLOMSTEIN and the Berlin Chamber of Architects have systematically recorded all public procurement procedures for architectural services in Berlin and analyzed them for deficiencies in the awarding process. A total of 603 procedures were evaluated. Among other things, the procurement monitoring was able to demonstrate that:
- small and medium-sized architectural firms often face significant, and in some cases nearly insurmountable, barriers to entering the public procurement market.
- the (German) requirement of awarding contracts by separate lots is often disregarded in the public procurement of architectural services, with contracts being awarded, for example, to general planners, as turnkey projects, or as framework agreements.
- although German procurement law theoretically offers design contests — a procedure specifically designed for awarding contracts for architectural services and ideally suited for this purpose, it is applied in only around 10% of procurement processes.
The final report is available here.
Pascal Friton and Moritz Schuchert contributed on our behalf. Many thanks to the Berlin Chamber of Architects for the constructive cooperation, especially to Michael Mackenrodt, Salomon Schindler, Pea Rausch, Vera Martinez and Torsten Förste