Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 14 May 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

National Broadband Plan: Discussion

Photo of Richard BrutonRichard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I accept that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has set out strong arguments but I assure the Deputy that the team evaluated all of those and they were also closely evaluated by the Government. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform was doing its job. Its job is to look at different elements of a project and to challenge those elements, which is exactly what it did. We looked at each element it challenged in great detail and, having done so, we are satisfied that the benefit is substantially in excess of the cost.

A cost-benefit ratio of 1:3 was arrived at on the basis of a very conservative application of the rules, but I believe that cost-benefit ratios, with which I am familiar from my previous occupation, do not allow evaluation of many of the reasons we are making this investment, which include the future use of the technologies about which we are talking. It will be as cloud technologies and the Internet of things take hold and as e-health is rolled out that the big benefits of this will be seen. When looking at home working, for example, the evaluation was based on 4% of people working from home. As the Deputy knows, 20% to 25% of employees in some progressive companies now work from home. When a secure network such as this is established, there will be many more people working from home. Companies will be willing to allow their employees to work from home when there is a secure fibre network. Not only was that very narrow cost-benefit ratio met, I am absolutely convinced that the benefits will enormous when one considers the significance of this technology in the long term.

Let it also be said that while the advice of one Department was negative, advice from many other Departments was very positive. Many such Departments foresaw the impact access to such a network would have on the delivery of public services in their spheres. Different advices were available to Government and we evaluated them all.

On the question of confidentiality, a confidential approach was of course taken in this matter. Over the period to the end of the signing of contracts, this contractor will have to engage with different subcontractors and will have to work out contracts with them and will have to negotiate prices on key elements. That is a key element of this work. Confidentiality was required in respect of the bidder's financial information, including its projections, investment and so on. In view of the issues the Deputy's party leader was raising and which he was raising himself, I asked my officials to ascertain whether the company would be willing to allow this information to be made public. It has agreed to that. I am not aware that it has issued a statement, but it is in accordance with the information which we believed it to be in the public interest to place in the public domain based on the comments of Deputies.

With regard to the investigation of the broadband plan, how it was evaluated, and the Deputy's desire to evaluate, it is important to note that all of these evaluations were carried out by independent teams rather than by politicians. They were entirely insulated from the political process. The evaluation teams, of which there were three looking at technical elements, financial elements, and all of the other elements, comprised groups of experts who were drawn in. These groups included officials from the Department and people from the likes of the National Development Finance Agency - independent financial institutions. It was they who did these evaluations and they who oversaw them. As the Deputy will see from the documentation, there was a layer of committees to go through before the reports were presented and the teams told us that this proposal had met all of the robustness tests set out in the original documentation.

This is not me deciding that it was a robust company or that the technology was optimal. These decisions were made independently of the political process. Having received this information and appraised all of the advice from different Departments, Government had to make a decision and that is the decision we made. The Deputy seems to be suggesting that this was a matter of covering a political case. There was no political dimension to this other than that we took a political decision at the end which, in my view, is what Government is about.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.