Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Fleming has identified a real problem of cowboy companies re-inventing themselves legally and getting new State contracts. This legislation is about providing solutions where a contract has gone wrong. The State, however, should be preventing these issues arising in the first place.

While I am not sure the amendment would stand up to a legal challenge, the Department should get a handle on it. The main cases of the practice Deputy Sean Fleming alluded to with which I am familiar are contracts with the Department of Education and Skills. I am sure this example is repeated throughout the country. A school gets a grant for a two-classroom extension which is put out to tender. Several contracts come in within €1,000 of each other. As the grant does not meet the full cost of the building, the board of management, which has to raise funds locally, cannot understand any logical reason why it should not take anything but the lowest price. Then, one has all the problems that flow from this.

I have written to the Minister for Education and Skills on this issue, asking him to oblige boards of management to employ appropriately qualified people, say quantity surveyors, to construct tender documents and assess them. What mainly happens is that schools employ a civil engineer to do up a design but who is then obliged to assess the tenders and so forth. This is where we run into difficulties. It would be better if schools and others involved in evaluating State contracts were not so preoccupied with taking the lowest possible price but were cognisant of a contractor’s capacity to undertake the job, not to leave other contractors unpaid and a trial of destruction behind him.

Quantity surveyors are a critical profession in this context and should be used to determine whether a job can be done for the price quoted. In the instances where projects ran into trouble, one will find they were not used appropriately. It is understandable why parents or a board of management would take the lowest price in a tender. The amendment is about preventing problems.