Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses and thank them for their attendance. I thank Mr. Murphy for his presentation. Last week's meeting was attended by officials from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I have some questions which I also asked them last week.

I wish to discuss the evaluation of the performance of public private partnerships in this country, what has been learned from the experience of PPPs in the United Kingdom and how it is planned to change the future structure of the PPP system in the United Kingdom. Mr. Murphy is far more knowledgeable than me about the UK system which has been in operation for some time. Changes have been made recently to the structure. At last week's meeting I referred to a report compiled by the UK National Audit Office in April 2011. The report made observations and arrived at conclusions on the PPP system. While it found that private finance delivered benefits for the delivery of infrastructural projects, it questioned whether more could be done to capture the share of the benefits for the taxpayer to level the playing field between the private company and the taxpayer. Is Mr. Murphy familiar with this report? In his view, is any of its conclusions applicable to Ireland?