The Urban Agenda for the EU Partnership on Innovative and Responsible Public Procurement held its 5th Partnership meeting on 14th May 2018 in Haarlem, The Netherlands.

The aim of the meeting was to present and discuss actions from the Action Plan, discuss the cross-cutting issues and to formulate concrete next steps for the Partnership. The meeting was kicked-off by the Director of the City of Haarlem, followed by a short introductory presentation by the Partnership Coordinator Valentina Schippers-Opejko from the City of Haarlem. 

The meeting continued with the presentation of 7 Action Implementation Plans: 

• Guidance on building city strategic procurement and how to manage strategic procurement
• Legal Handbook innovative public procurement 
• Innovation broker - after the meeting agreed to be called "Innovation Procurement Brokerage"
• Develop a flexible and customisable concept for Local Competence Centres for innovative and sustainable procurement
• Competence building in Circular Procurement including
• Measuring spend in EU cities
• Recommendation(s) for future EU funding for joint cross-border procurement, procurement of innovation, strategic procurement in particular social procurement and circular procurement

Afternoon working session allowed for the action teams to make agreements about the action names, focus, methods, timelines, outputs, etc. Based on the Action Implementation Plans and the presentations of the Action leaders, all members of the Partnership were been asked to provide remarks and attention points to each of the seven actions. Group working session with attention points for each action aimed to create a collective input for the actions in the Action Plan (to be delivered on 22nd May 2018). A unanimous attention point for all actions was to make a proposal in the Action Implementation Plan on how to keep the products/results of the Partnership after 2019 (when the work of our Partnership is completed).

This meeting gave the partners and especially the action leaders a lot of homework: The Partnership is now preparing the final version of the Draft Action Plan. Moreover, the Partnership has agreed upon working towards the upcoming Public Feedback in June with dedicated communication and promotion strategy. The next Partnership meeting is expected in Haarlem on 24 September 2018.

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