Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 31 January 2019

Public Accounts Committee

National Paediatric Hospital Development Board: Financial Statements 2017

9:00 am

Mr. Tom Costello:

We are guided by the public spending code. In essence, clear guidelines are set out in terms of how we manage the project as well as the rules around procurement and so on. It is very clear. Then, we are audited on an annual basis. That shows that we are working within the code in place.

I will go back to the past six months when this became obvious in the beginning. There has been huge and intense work from the board and the executive to interrogate every euro of this. We put in place a number of reviews. First of all, the aim was to check where we identified the additional spending, especially for mechanical and electrical spending. The idea was to ensure that what we had designed was fit for purpose and to ensure that we were not over-designed. That is relevant for one of the reports and we can talk about it in a while. We set out to ensure that we got competitive rates in 2016 and to ensure they were applied to the updated quantities and, at the end of the day, to ensure we were paying for what we are getting. At the end of the day, the quantities have increased, but right now we are paying for what we are getting and we have the benefit of the competitive rates we got in 2016.

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