The allocation of Pnrr funds penalizes SMEs. Cna focuses on the new Code

In the intentions of the government, the new Procurement Code which will be launched in a few days promises to ensure simplicity, efficiency and speed. Principles engraved in the Community directives at the origin and extremely precious for putting to ground the enormous resources of the Pnrr and of the community programming, about 350 billion by 2026 adding also the unallocated European funds and which are about 50 percent of the total 2014-2020 cycle. Like Cna, the hope is that the declination of the new code will guarantee decidedly better results than the 2016 discipline, despite a constant regulatory maintenance activity.
Cna has often reminded the legislator that on the public procurement market the Community guidelines indicate with particular emphasis the requirement to facilitate access for SMEs. A pillar of the strategy that has never found an adequate declination in the Italian regulatory architecture. It is for this reason that since the drafting of the Pnrr we have signaled the need for careful monitoring to avert the risk that the need to spend the resources assigned in certain, and above all limited, times could generate a concentration in the allocation of funds . A macroscopic contradiction with the principles incorporated in the delegation and with the map of the productive fabric, made up of just under 97 percent of micro enterprises (up to 10 employees).

Some recent evidence justifies the alarm raised by the Confederation of craftsmen and small businesses on the strong limitation of competition in the public procurement market. Proceeding with the assignment of lots with amounts exceeding 10 million euros automatically means excluding almost 97 percent of Italian companies. In fact, to participate in public tenders it is necessary to respect the financial requirement according to which the participating company must have a turnover greater than double the value of the tender and only slightly more than 3 percent of Italian companies manage to exceed the bar of 20 million of revenues. In concrete terms, analyzing the amount classes of the 2021 tenders, the vast majority of small businesses (over 96 percent of the total) can potentially access only 17 percent of the public procurement market, and the share they actually manage to win struggles to exceed 5 percent of the total value of this market.

The size of the lots therefore takes on a decisive significance in ensuring a high level of competition in a market with large numbers (almost 200 billion last year). Among other things, the latest Community directives urge the contracting authorities to proceed towards a greater subdivision of the lots precisely to encourage the participation of SMEs. It is a theme that does not only concern Italy, which is often portrayed as an anomaly in Europe with reference to the size class of the companies. The data instead describe another reality. We are in line with the European average, very similar to France and Spain, while only Germany has a significantly higher average company size.

The concentration of lots discounts the impoverishment of professionalism in the Public Administration but the lack of a limitation on subcontracting also contributes to aggravating the picture with negative effects on the geography of the companies and on the quality of the works. Over the years, above all, the intermediary companies grew and prospered, equipped with efficient technical offices but without workers to carry out the work. Furthermore, the concentration of the lots is a source of dilation of the construction times of the works which represents the main criticality of the system. As noted by the Council of State, the number of disputes is directly proportional to the volume of the contract. To encourage the participation of SMEs in the public procurement market, it would be useful to promote aggregation tools, which are also functional to the strategy of strengthening businesses. But even on this front the distortion is very evident in that, sometimes, the agent or principal company of the grouping is asked to possess all the requisites for participation in the tender, effectively canceling out the potential benefit of the mergers.

Historically, public spending represents a fundamental driving force for economic growth but also for supporting the processes of transformation and modernization of the productive fabric. The new code will therefore have to improve the public administration’s spending capacity in terms of efficiency and timing, but it will also have to fulfill the function of stimulating the growth and strengthening of businesses by promoting competition. The exact opposite of erecting hurdles and raising posts.

Mario Pagani, Cna industrial policy manager

Claudio Di Donato, Cna