On 25 November 2025 the European Commission opened a call for evidence on simplifying defence and sensitive-security procurement, announcing the reform proposal for the third quarter of 2026; on 10 June 2026 the Council and the Parliament struck a provisional deal on a separate simplification package amending the same Directive. Both exercises address a market whose measured cross-border segment, on the Commission’s own evaluation of Directive 2009/81/EC, amounted to EUR 2.26 billion in 2008-2010, or 0.86 per cent of total defence procurement expenditure. European rearmament depends not only on the volume of public money committed to defence but also on the number and quality of suppliers that can contest the resulting demand. Classified procurement complicates that relationship because the information required to understand a requirement, price technical risk and prepare a credible offer may itself be protected. The resulting market-access question is narrower than the general cost of maintaining cleared industrial capacity: it concerns the point at which security authorisation becomes necessary. A company that is legally eligible for a competition but cannot receive the technical material needed to bid is in a different position from one that may compete without clearance and obtain it only before award or performance. Which of those two positions a supplier occupies is settled before a notice is published, by an authority under no obligation to explain the choice, and no public record shows how often each choice is made.
This report examines that decision through the instruments that make it. It works from the Directive on defence and security procurement in the consolidated version current from 1 January 2026; from the Council and Commission regimes governing EU classified information; from NATO’s publicly disclosed directive on classified project and industrial security; and from the national instruments of five systems — the United Kingdom’s facility clearance policy and sponsorship rules, France’s interministerial and ministerial secrecy instructions, Germany’s defence and security procurement regulation, Italy’s industrial security authorisations and the Netherlands’ new security requirements for government contracts. It reads those rules against four contemporary procurement notices, one Dutch judgment and the structured fields through which the EU notice standard can disclose a clearance deadline. The sections that follow set out what an ex ante gate is and when it exists; the EU legal baseline; national implementation and the timing of access; what the post-2024 procurement record can and cannot show; cross-border recognition, subcontracting and corporate change; and what the mechanism means for smaller suppliers and for rearmament. The report does not estimate how many suppliers the gate excludes, does not rank national systems by clearance speed, and does not treat the pending simplification measures as law. No public source discloses the population of facility clearance holders, applications, processing times or refusals by company size, and the analysis is bounded accordingly.