ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Spanish contract cleaning association ASPEL has asked the government to follow the example of the Administrator of Railway Infrastructures ADIF and stop using price as the sole evaluation criterion when awarding public contracts. It says other aspects such as quality of service must be taken into account.

ASPEL president Juan Díez de los Ríos expressed satisfaction that the public body has raised the weighting of technical tenders to 49 per cent against 51 per cent for financial tenders. The company has also decided to stiffen its conditions, to prevent tendering with recklessly-reduced prices. The cleaning association would like other public administrations to follow its example.

Since ASPEL published its report ‘The Tyranny of Price' over a year ago it has been campaigning for a ‘results approach' in contracting of services - where the quality of the service is paramount - rather than the ‘hours approach', where a price is assigned as a function of the number of hours worked.