Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his generous comments. His last point is an excellent one. I agree that development of this major IT infrastructure programme, which will bring together information from the Department of Social Protection and the Revenue Commissioners and, thus, bring us into the 21st century in terms of infrastructure for Government services, will bring about learning for the development process for other IT initiatives, be they to amend what already exists in the mental health arena or to create something new. It is important we do not repeat the mistakes of the past and that we get this right so that the pay-off will be not only child care infrastructure but will be beyond that indicated by Deputy Neville. The people who are overseeing this process, including officials from my Department, the peer review group and members of the other groups established in this context, and providing us with expertise in this area may be able to offer us expertise on how to shorten timeframes as we move forward on other initiatives in the future.

The process of procurement that we have adopted for the website developer team has contributed to the increase in the timeframe for the development of this project. We propose to move from a framework agreement in terms of procurement of developers to a full open tender process. A tender document comprises more than 1,000 pages. It will take a couple of weeks to read a tender document of that size. We have opted for an open tender process as distinct from the framework agreement put in place by Pobal. We also considered other framework agreements. A full analysis was undertaken of the entire open tender process versus the framework agreements process and it was ultimately decided that an open tender approach to the procurement process was necessary to ensure the most robust procurement for a large-scale IT project. That is the approach we were advised to take and we ultimately decided to do that. The project will be put out to open tender and applicants will have just under 50 days to submit an application. The applications will then be reviewed and we hope and expect that we will have a contract in place within 25 weeks and work will commence in July 2018. I hope that explains the reason for the approach we have taken and the expected timeframe of the process of procurement. As I said, once the contractor has been selected we will be in a stronger position to identify when the development of the processes will be completed. In this regard, the indicative timeframe is May 2019. However, this cannot be confirmed until such time as a contract has been agreed, etc.. We expect to be providing subsidies for September 2019. As I indicated, as of September 2018, families may apply for their subsidies in the same way as they did in September 2017. As we move towards September 2019, there will be a migration to the new model and this will be fully communicated as the process progresses.