I had the honour of being invited to speak at the workshop on "Contract Changes in a European Perspective" organised by the Danish Association for Public Procurement (Dansk Forening for Udbudsret), where I shared thoughts with academic colleagues that have been researching on the topic for a long time--such as Prof Steen Treumer, Dr Piotr Bogdanowicz and Dr Carina Risvig Hamer--as well as with practitioners, such as Erik Kjær-Hansen, facing the increasingly complex task of advising contracting authorities and economic operators.
In my presentation, I covered general issues concerning the interaction between contract modifications and competition for public contracts (slides below), Piotr concentrated on specific interpretive difficulties raised by Article 72 of Directive 2014/24/EU, and the general discussion raised interesting topics based on Danish practice--which is rather sophisticated, and also in a state of shock after the CJEU's Finn Frogne decision of last year (see here).
In my view, there are significant challenges derived from the extension of EU rules to the execution phase of public contracts and the pro-competitive logic that generally inspires the rules in Article 72 of Directive 2014/24/EU, as well as the previous case law of the CJEU, is limited and bound to continue hitting the wall of unnecessary inflexibility of procurement procedures unless some more commercially-oriented sophistication is introduced in future case law (which should limit, if not reverse, Finn Frogne).
In the meantime, there is notable pressure on lawyers involved in the drafting of contract modification clauses, which are after an impossible mix of flexibility and predictability. Definitely an area where further discussions are needed. If you want to get involved in the conversation, please feel free to email me at a.sanchez-graells@bristol.ac.uk (or comment below).