The European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) is a list of questions that potential suppliers have to answer to provide a self-declaration that none of the exclusion grounds has been breached, and that they meet the required selection criteria.
It is a standard form and should make the process of bidding for a public contract easier. The exclusion grounds are those listed in the EU Directive. As the same exclusion grounds will be used in ESPDs across the EU a potential supplier will be able to re-use a form which it has previously submitted for another competition as long as the information is still correct.
You can evaluate ESPDs submitted by potential suppliers from other countries alongside those submitted by UK suppliers because they have a common reference to the EU Directive exclusion grounds.
Only the winner will normally have to submit the certificates as evidence. If available, the certificates can be retrieved by the buyer directly from the respective registers.
The questions asked in the ESPD align with the first two sections of the standard CCS Selection Questionnaire. Although CCS in their Selection Questionnaire, have made the questions easier to understand and listed the relevant national laws that fit into the exclusion categories.
In the UK we already operate a system of self-declaration. The main change to the process is that verification of the declarations, of both the exclusion grounds and the selection information, should only take place with the winning suppliers.
The European Single Procurement Document developed by the Commission includes supplier selection questions that follow the grounds for exclusion questions. These questions are not mandatory and CCS have made the policy decision to substitute these optional selection questions with those in the standard Selection Questionnaire.