The Generalitat wants to speed up public works: it returns more powers to the ministries to contract

BarcelonaThe Generalitat has approved a decree law to speed up the execution of public works and expand the access of small and medium-sized companies to contracts from the Catalan administration, as reported by the Government itself on Tuesday.

The decree must change the current regulations, approved in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. That regulation reduced the thresholds for the different departments of the Generalitat to directly award public works and for the drafting of studies and projects, so that all works with a cost greater than 2 million euros and all studies of more than 100,000 euros had to be carried out solely by Infraestructures.cat, the Generalitat company in charge of investments.

With the new decree, the regulations are reverted to the same thresholds as before 2020, so now a department of the Generalitat will be able to draft projects of more than 2 million and award works for 15 million. The legal text also includes that in contracts for infrastructure and renewable energy installations, the thresholds will be set at 2 million for the awards and 300,000 euros for the studies.

This measure seeks, above all, to free up work for the company Infraestructures.cat, according to sources from the Government. Currently, this company is working on 677 projects and 800 works, most of them for values less than 250,000 euros. The aim of the Catalan executive is, therefore, that Infraestructures.cat can focus on large public works projects while smaller projects are put out to tender and awarded directly to the ministries without having to go through this public company.

The Government also seeks to increase the percentage of public works carried out. In 2024, Infraestructures.cat executed 71% of the projects it had underway, a figure that the executive plans to increase to 85%.

However, these changes will not prevent the departments from continuing to use Infraestructures.cat, but they will go less often and this company, together with the Catalan Energy Institute (Icaen), will have an advisory role in the case of minor works. The Generalitat, therefore, plans to increase the staff of some departments to reinforce the teams dedicated to tendering, especially in the ministries that carry out more works, such as Territory, Education, Health, Social Rights and Interior.

More facilities for SMEs

The decree also introduces the obligation to divide public contracts into different lots that would be awarded separately. With this measure, the executive wants to make it easier for SMEs, Start-ups and social economy companies can access more contracts. Normally, SMEs have difficulties in obtaining public works contracts because very large projects are put out to tender in a unified manner, for which only large companies are qualified.

In fact, until now many SMEs that work in public works do so by subcontracting larger private companies that have won government tenders. Thus, in these situations, the larger company receives payment from the government and then pays the subcontracted SMEs.

The new decree opens the door for, in these cases, subcontractors to receive payment directly from the Generalitat if they prove that they have participated in a project and subsequently the Generalitat will discount the money from the contract winner, a measure that should reduce payment periods for SMEs and improve them by 0 and 0 5.5 million in public works contracts.

Possible difficulties in validating the decree

The modifications will be made effective by means of a decree law that modifies several regulations. The decree law comes into force after its publication, but for its effects to be maintained, it is necessary that it receives the green light from Parliament within a month.

The Government wants to move forward with the votes of the investiture partners, ERC and the Commons. According to sources from the executive, the Commons have already guaranteed their support, while a meeting with the Republicans is planned to talk this Thursday. However, the same sources assure that they have not detected that it could be "a conflictive decree", although the changes that are now being reversed had been approved by a coalition government of Junts and ERC with Pere Aragonès as Minister of Economy. At the meeting, other open files between the Government and ERC could also be addressed, such as the decree of a credit supplement to inject more than 4,000 million euros into the Catalan budgets, which have been extended.

However, the Government's plans to validate the decree could come up against some obstacles. Precisely this Tuesday, ERC announced that it has asked the Council of Statutory Guarantees for an opinion on the latest decree law on housing, which creates the register of large holders and includes measures to speed up the construction of protected housing. The Republicans do not question its content, but its form: they complain that the Socialists are abusing the figure of the decree law, designed for cases of "extraordinary and urgent need", to avoid the parliamentary negotiation of the ordinary legislative procedure.

"The Government has forced the use of the decree law too much in the face of the political inability to approve budgets," the Republicans have lamented. If ERC maintains this position, this could complicate the negotiation to obtain their votes for the public works decree law approved this Tuesday. At a press conference, the regional minister and spokesperson for the Government, Sílvia Paneque, justified the use of this formula to address the urgent needs in terms of housing and the execution of public works, which, in her opinion, occur at a time when Catalonia has its budgets extended. "It is fully justified," she said.