Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 19 November 2015
Public Accounts Committee
2014 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 11 - Office of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform
Vote 12 - Superannuation and Retired Allowances
Vote 18 - Shared Services
Vote 41 - Office of Government Procurement
Chapter 4 - Vote Accounting and Budget Management
Chapter 5 - Management of Government Grants
Chapter 6 - Payroll Accrual for National Accounts
Chapter 7 - National Lottery Fund
10:00 am
Mr. Robert Watt:
We do not find it frustrating; it is just a challenge. It takes up an awful lot of our time. Colleagues in the Department of Health and HSE are very much focused on doing their best in terms of managing budgets and delivering the service as best they can.
The comparison with the Department of Social Protection is interesting. The thing about social protection is that there is a payment rate and a given number of recipients. We have an idea of the number of pensioners next year and of the number of children who will no longer be eligible for the child benefit. We know the likely number of births. With the vast majority of social protection schemes, we have a reasonable fix.
Unemployment is the one area where it is very difficult but in the past four or five years, we have done reasonably well in terms of forecasting spend under social protection. This year is an exception in that the live register figures have not come down as fast as we thought they would. On average, it is about 9,000 or 10,000 above where we thought it would be and that will lead to an overspend. Within social protection, therefore, we have a reasonable fix.
The health system is vast, with 100,000 people employed and a spend of €14 billion. There are so many different delivery units. It is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are so many different aspects and demands to it that it is very difficult and an enormous challenge but we are working with the Health Service Executive and the Department of Health on how we can get a better matrix in terms of looking at the demand and what is likely to impact on spending over time.
There is a challenge for the next number of years as we move to the preventative arm of the new fiscal rules. There is less scope for Government to have Supplementary Estimates during the year and if there are significant overruns in one area, there will have to be compensatory changes elsewhere to stay within the overall fiscal space the Government is allowed. The new rules will have a greater impact in the future on the capacity of Government to have Supplementary Estimates of the type we have seen in the past number of years.
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