Mr. Vincent Campbell:

One of the big issues is that many sectors were acting independently of the centre, but they were still complying with national procurement rules and EU regulations. It is not that they were not complying with the directives or the rules. However, the right hand was not seeing what the left hand was doing and they were not doing what the office of government procurement will do, which is looking at the bigger picture versus looking internally at what each sector is doing. There are a significant number of independent operations. While they are fully compliant, they are not looking at expenditure from the point of view that there are major savings to be gained through aggregation, looking at how the market is operating and applying the market intelligence to get better deals and talking to the market in advance before going to it, which is what we are now doing and will do in the future.

There is a further significant saving, as our chairman adverted to, in administration. Instead of 200 or 300 public bodies operating independently in procuring common goods, doing this centrally through one or two offerings to the market may in aggregate cost €25,000 or €30,000 - that is the accepted figure - but we will save up to €1.5 million on administration costs across the public sector before one starts to talk about the savings aggregation will deliver and that the market will deliver by putting bigger offerings to it.