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Department for International Development

Promoting labour standards in public procurement

Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) commissioned Public World to conduct desk-based research into the extent to which core labour standards were taken into account in the purchasing decisions of national and local government in European Union (EU) countries.

The aim was to identify if DFID itself could be doing so more to use its own procurement to promote better labour standards, or whether there were legal or other impediments to doing so.

DFID asked us to take both a wide look at EU country practice and a deeper look at those of seven countries with variable public administration and jurisdictional systems.

The focus was on finding out if the ILO's eight fundamental conventions and the Ethical Trading Initiative's Base Code are used as reference points for defining best practice, and to comment on the degree to which the policy, regulation and purchasing practice identified was compliant with EU procurement regulation.

You can download our report here.