For uniform suppliers operating across Europe today, public procurement is not an abstract policy debate; it is the difference between a viable regional business and one that quietly shifts its operations to the other side of the world. The question of whether European governments will introduce legislation to protect nearshore manufacturers operating within Europe and its immediate periphery has moved from wishful thinking to urgent necessity.
The evidence is unambiguous. The professional clothing sector has made clear that without structured government intervention, nearshore uniform manufacturing faces an existential threat. The solution consistently pointed to is a procurement framework that mandates European and nearshore sourcing and understanding why requires examining what such an approach would achieve.
What Nearshore Procurement Mandates Do and Why They Work
The United States’ Berry Amendment, introduced during World War II, requires the Department of Defence[DO1] to procure specified goods, including textiles and clothing, from domestic sources. It is not simply a protectionist measure; it is a national security instrument. By guaranteeing a consistent flow of government contracts to American manufacturers, it sustains the industrial base, supports skilled employment, and ensures that when demand surges during a crisis, the capacity to respond exists close to home.
The defence clothing industry makes this case most directly. Recent supply disruptions from port congestion to geopolitical shocks have exposed the fragility of single-source, long-haul procurement, and such incidents are becoming less exceptional and more routine. A nearshore mandate, prioritising suppliers within Europe and its immediate geographic neighbourhood Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Western Balkans addresses this not by asking any one nation to shoulder the industrial burden alone, but by distributing it across a resilient, proximate network. Dual sourcing, balancing proximity with commercial competition, is no longer a contingency option. For sectors as operationally critical as defence clothing, it is a baseline requirement.
The Problem Across Europe
The current system is broken for near-shore manufacturers. Suppliers consistently report losing tenders not because their products are inferior, but because far-offshore competitors, predominantly in China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, can undercut them dramatically on price. A technical garment produced in Portugal or Poland may cost considerably more than an equivalent sourced from East Asia. Margins reflect this structural imbalance starkly.
These are not anomalies. They reflect global cost differentials that European procurement policy currently does nothing to offset. While various governments have pledged to increase the proportion of public goods sourced from European and regional suppliers, the lived experience of manufacturers is that contracts continue to go to the lowest global bidder. Policy commitments remain largely rhetorical.
What makes this especially frustrating for near-shore uniform suppliers is that they are being asked to compete in a system that does not value what they offer. Manufacturers operating in Europe and its near neighbourhood provide shorter lead times, greater flexibility, transparent and auditable supply chains, shared regulatory standards, and the ability to scale rapidly in a crisis. These are exactly the qualities that public sector buyers in healthcare, defence, and emergency services should be prioritising, yet procurement decisions remain almost entirely cost-driven.
The key insight here is that nearshore does not mean any single country must carry the full industrial load. A garment cut in Morocco, assembled in Portugal, and finished in Germany still represents a fundamentally different risk profile from one sourced entirely from a facility 9,000 kilometres away in a geopolitically volatile region. European procurement frameworks should be designed to recognise and reward that difference.
COVID-19: A Lesson Still Being Ignored
The proof of concept arrived in early 2020, and it was damning. The Ministry of Defence reported that 80% of its clothing orders failed to arrive on schedule, a direct consequence of sourcing concentrated within the geography around Wuhan. Across Europe, healthcare systems were left critically exposed. Nurses and carers improvised protective equipment as governments restricted PPE exports to protect their own domestic supplies first. These were not minor operational hiccups. They were foreseeable failures of a procurement system that had systematically traded geographic proximity for short-term cost savings.
The lesson was stark. It was also apparently not learned.
Today, Red Sea shipping attacks are forcing vessels onto longer, slower, and more expensive alternative routes. Tariff volatility is making long-haul sourcing agreements harder to price and harder to honour. Geopolitical fractures between China and Western nations are casting doubt over the durability of supply relationships that entire procurement frameworks were built around. And yet, for too many public and defence buyers, the default remains the same: award to the cheapest global bidder, absorb the risk, and hope the disruption lands somewhere else.
It will not always. The current environment is not an anomaly to be managed around. It is the new baseline. And procurement frameworks that have not fundamentally rethought their exposure to distant, single-source supply chains are not operating with commercial discipline. They are repeating a mistake that COVID-19 already made unforgivable.
A nearshore supply chain, distributed across Europe and its immediate neighbours, directly answers this. Multiple source countries create multiple points of redundancy. Shared trade frameworks reduce friction. Physical proximity compresses transit times and insulates against the kind of distant geopolitical shocks that are no longer rare events they are the recurring condition under which modern supply chains must now perform.
What a European Nearshore Mandate Would Mean for Uniform Suppliers
For uniform suppliers operating in or near Europe, the introduction of a meaningful near-shore sourcing requirement for public sector contracts would be transformative. The core problem the sector faces is not a lack of capability; it is a lack of reliable demand. Manufacturers across the nearshore network describe running facilities at marginal returns, unable to justify the capital investment needed to modernise, simply because the order flow to support it does not exist under current procurement conditions.
A nearshore procurement mandate, one that requires a defined proportion of public sector uniform and PPE contracts to be awarded to suppliers operating within Europe or established near-shore partner countries, would change that calculus directly. It would create the demand certainty that enables businesses to invest in capacity, modernise equipment, retain skilled workers, and pay competitive wages. What manufacturers need most is not grants or advisory schemes, but contracts and the confidence that winning them does not require matching the labour costs of a factory in Guangdong.
The workforce implications extend beyond the immediate supply chain. A stable pipeline of nearshore public contracts would support employment across a wide geographic arc from Southern and Eastern Europe, where significant textile and garment manufacturing expertise exists, to North African partners whose proximity and trade relationships make them natural participants in a resilient European supply network. This is industrial policy with a genuinely continental dimension.
Closing the Loopholes: Origin Washing and Traceability
Any near-shore sourcing legislation must address the practice of “origin washing” goods marketed as European or nearshore-made when the substantive manufacturing was done entirely in far-offshore facilities, with only a minor finishing step or relabeling applied closer to home. This practice not only deceives public sector buyers but also actively undercuts genuine near-shore producers, who cannot compete against the combined advantage of far-offshore costs and a European label.
Stricter enforcement of country-of-origin rules, combined with robust supply chain traceability requirements, including the adoption of digital product passports now being developed under EU sustainability legislation, is a necessary complement to any nearshore sourcing mandate. Without it, legislation can be gamed, and the manufacturers it is designed to support remain disadvantaged.
Traceability requirements serve a dual purpose: they protect procurement integrity, and they incentivise the kind of supply chain transparency that responsible public buyers should, in any case, be demanding of their contractors.
Time for Action
European governments cannot credibly champion industrial resilience, supply chain sovereignty, and strategic autonomy while simultaneously awarding most of their uniform and PPE contracts to manufacturers operating on the other side of the world. The contradiction is one that nearshore suppliers live with daily.
The path forward is clear in principle, even if implementation requires care: mandate a meaningful proportion of public sector professional clothing contracts for suppliers operating within Europe and established nearshore partner countries; enforce origin and traceability standards rigorously; and provide the investment frameworks that allow nearshore businesses to modernise and compete at scale. The logic of the Berry Amendment that strategic industries require strategic procurement applies here just as compellingly.
