Mr. Ian Talbot:

I thank everybody for their questions. I am aware that Senator Quinn is very engaged with the issue of upward-only rent reviews. One of the challenges we have in our network is that our chambers throughout the country are not seeing it as an issue. It is not being seen as one of our priorities. We keep revalidating it. Every time the Senator communicates with me, we go back out to our network to revalidate our position. We have a very clear brief from our network to the effect that we should get involved in things that are priorities for our chambers. I will be happy to talk to the Senator about it afterwards. The members of our network are saying they do not see it as a huge issue. It might be a bigger issue in some areas than in others. It is not one of our network's priorities. We keep revalidating our position. We did so in light of the great work the Senator did in February, when he put a group together. We have to make sure we are current. I can talk to the Senator about that later.

Reference was also made to public procurement. I ask the committee not to misunderstand what we are saying about the need to drive efficient purchasing. We fully agree that there is a need to drive waste and inefficiency out of the public procurement sector. We have developed recommendations about ensuring procurement is undertaken by properly qualified professionals. The role of those professionals will be to ensure procurement is done correctly - there should be no waste - and is not done at the expense of Irish small and medium-sized businesses. If one looks at price on its own, or as a certain percentage of the tender, there is a danger that as competitive bids come in from other countries, it becomes impossible to make a difference in other respects. At the moment, there is a tender out for approximately €6.5 million worth of books for Dún Laoghaire library. I understand that 65% of the tender calculation will be based on price. The danger is that a large warehouse in the UK will be able to supply that. This would have a significant impact on the Irish book industry. It is very difficult to make an impact in the other 35% of the weighting, which relates to service issues, that is sufficient to outweigh the 65% of the weighting that relates to price alone. There is a need for balance not only in the evaluation of the tender, but also in the criteria that are used in the first place to set the tender.

Deputy Lawlor made a similar point about procurement. We absolutely and fully agree that there is a need to ensure we get good value for our procurement. All of these points can be tied together. A point was made about how other countries are doing it. The LM3 model tries to evaluate the social impact of procurement. We have set up meetings with a software vendor that supplies a great deal of software to the UK procurement market to see if there is anything we can learn from that country's experience in this area. I do not have all the answers to the very good questions that have been asked. We are looking at these matters.

I was also asked about the Ohio model. We have a link on the page. I do not have a list of the stuff in front of me. I ask the members of the committee to look at the link. I apologise for our phones. I have turned my phone off. Mr. Murphy tried to use his phone and got certain feedback. We put up the link specifically so that people could look at it. The model in question looks like a good one. It is covered in the footnotes.

I would like to respond to what was said about the possibility of putting together companies that have done tendering. One of the challenges is that there is a lot of rhetoric out there. At the moment, small businesses are reluctant to get involved with eTenders.

We are trying to get people over this hurdle so they get involved. There is also much rhetoric about competition, with regard to companies grouping together to bid and the impact of competition law on this. There is much fear, and there is an onus on the Office of Government Procurement and on procurement managers to do a good job and get into their local communities to encourage the right type of organisation to get involved. We will work with our members and chambers to educate people better on the advantages. Some of this perhaps comes back to the surprising lack of computer literacy we still see in some organisations, which is of concern. One must be computer literate to engage in the Government public procurement process at present. We need to drive forward on these issues.

With regard to practical suggestions on red tape, do not get me wrong because much good work is coming out of various Departments to try to reduce the amount of business regulation and red tape, but we need to keep going on it. Approximately 37 different Acts apply to the employment of a person and this is very difficult for a small business. This is a good example of red tape. In 1997, the taxes Acts were consolidated where finance Acts over 30 or 40 years were consolidated into one and we started again. This probably needs to be done again but that is another matter. This type of approach needs to be taken to employment regulation because that is what puts off somebody from employing an extra person. We all know that if every small business in the country employed one more person, our unemployment problem would be largely solved.

The various inspections which must be dealt with by someone in the restaurant business are not necessarily co-ordinated. Perhaps we should have central co-ordination of inspections by sector rather than by Department or quango. Various issues such as this can make an employer's life very difficult. Our view is that it should be as easy as possible for employers to create employment.