Light-Touch Regime Services: Procurement Rules for Health and Education

The light-touch regime (LTR) applies to services in Schedule 3 of S.I. 284/2016, which include social services, health services, educational services, legal services, cultural services, hotel and restaurant services, and certain administrative services. For these services, the full above-threshold procedure requirements of S.I. 284/2016 only apply when the contract value exceeds €750,000 (VAT exclusive).

Below €750,000, LTR contracts are subject only to the fundamental procurement principles — equal treatment, non-discrimination, transparency and proportionality — rather than the full procedural requirements of Directives. This provides significant flexibility for health and social care bodies procuring these types of services.

The rationale for the LTR is that services such as healthcare, social work, education and legal advice often have local, relational or person-centred characteristics that make them poorly suited to standardised EU-wide competitive tendering. A care home operator or community education provider may not be able to scale to serve an international tender process, even if they deliver excellent local services.

The LTR also reflects the political sensitivity of opening certain public services to cross-border competition. While the fundamental principles still apply, the absence of minimum tender periods, OJEU publication obligations and prescriptive procedure requirements gives contracting authorities much more flexibility in how they run the competition.

Above the €750,000 threshold, contracting authorities must publish a notice on eTenders and, for larger contracts, in the OJEU. The notice must give adequate time for interested parties to express interest or submit tenders, and award criteria must be published in advance. Beyond these requirements, the authority has flexibility to design a process appropriate to the specific service.

Below the €750,000 threshold, the authority is not required to publish a notice but should, as a matter of good governance, run some form of competitive process proportionate to the value and risk of the contract. The OGP guidance recommends seeking at least three quotations for contracts above €25,000 and below the LTR threshold.

A common misconception is that LTR services can be awarded without any competition below €750,000. The fundamental principles still require transparency and non-discrimination. A health body that consistently awards care services to the same provider without any competitive process faces audit risk, even where the contracts are below the LTR threshold.

Another misconception is that the LTR applies to any service that health or education bodies buy. The LTR applies only to services in Schedule 3 — it does not apply to ICT contracts, construction, supplies or other standard services bought by health or education bodies, which are subject to the standard thresholds and procedures.