Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The Chairman may recall that, maybe at the previous Committee of Public Accounts, there was discussion with the small firms and small traders about this issue of aggregation or disaggregation or bundling. That does have an implication for the value for money achieved. The theory of it is that the bigger the scale on which one operates, the more one benefits from an economy of scale. That then militates against small suppliers, however, so what one is looking for is a kind of happy medium. With greater aggregation there are also longer chains of supply and one is more dependent on one supplier and can kind of get locked into a big supplier, so it is a very complicated process. I think the Office of Government Procurement is very expert in all this and should be able to provide information to the committee and have a dialogue with them at the strategic level as to what they are doing, why they are doing it and what is needed.