Mr. Paul Quinn:

The last set of data we provided publicly related to 2011 data. It is important to understand the context of that data in that the Government advertises its opportunities on the e-tenders website. Where the opportunity breaches certain thresholds, the spend also must be advertised on the EU journal. For example, in the works context the figure is a little over €5 million, with goods and services by Departments it is €134,000, for other public bodies the figure is €270,000 and with utilities it is €400,000. Once these thresholds are exceeded, there is a requirement on public sector bodies to publish not only locally but also in the EU. The data is gathered with respect to the outcome of those processes. Typically, it takes some time to gather the data because some of the contracts may be large, the opportunities may be significant and the processes could take quite some time to work through. That is why we may hear of data that seems to be years old. Sometimes the processes take some time.

With regard to the 2011 data, for the spend in excess of the threshold, €240 million of procurement was awarded to businesses not within the State. That was from a total public procurement spend, which is somewhere between €12 billion and €13 billion. That would indicate a rate of approximately 5%. If we consider this as a subset of those competitions going to market, there would be a different number.