Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The idea of co-ordinated procurement, which no previous Government really did in the manner being undertaken by the Department of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, is to use the purchasing power of 3,200 primary schools, turn them into one customer for electricity and exercise that bulk buying volume to reduce unit prices in terms of cost. Prior to that, there was an understandable culture that individual schools saw themselves as individuals dealing directly with the Department of Education and Skills and with other suppliers, whether for reams of paper, for electricity or for other commodities. In the case of electricity, where one is dealing with one or two suppliers and because of the nature of the network, one is able to say 3,200 primary schools is a bulk buyer of the product and to leverage that price per unit of electricity downwards. That is a new concept and we are trying to introduce not only in education but right across the entire public sector spectrum. We found that the same unit of typing paper or whatever was being supplied by the same supplier to different public authorities, which were not in communication with each other, at different prices. The National Procurement Service has been deliberately put in place to avoid that kind of mismatch and to get the maximum value for the same quality of product one is currently getting. It is not a diminution of the quality of the product one is getting but rather getting the flattest price one can based on the total demand for the product.