City Council has drafted the first guidelines on social and environmental public procurement as a package of measures to incentivise the contracting of companies and professionals whose business model is based on social and environmental criteria. The move promotes socially and environmentally responsible procurement based on measures to be included in administrative processes and aimed at offsetting the importance of economic criteria in public tendering. Likewise, the measures include criteria which protect small and medium-sized companies, labour rights, the cooperative, social and solidarity economy, ethical public purchasing, gender equality, respect for disabilities, are non-sexist and respect conciliation.

At the same time, a municipal label will be created as public recognition for companies satisfying these requisites within a socially responsible business model, which will go on to form part of a municipal registry of companies. Along with the measure prohibiting providers to City Council from having any illegal economic activity in countries considered tax havens, the drafting of a memory of social procurement and the limiting of direct contracting without publishing the process, the aim of this measure is to ensure maximum transparency for all administrative activity, in particular in the area of public procurement.

The First Deputy Mayor, Gerardo Pisarello, remarked: “The intention of the municipal government is to make public procurement an authentic economic driving force in the city, which contributes to the change of economic model and the improvement of the social model and is at the service of people and the common good”.

The guidelines on social and environmental public procurement should be applied by City Council and the companies and entities making up the municipal group, with the corresponding adjustments in each sphere of action to be made according to the legal framework governing procurement for that area.