Mr. David Moloney:

I thank the Deputy for the question. Before Mr. Quinn comes in on some of the operational aspects of that question, it is important to understand the role and nature of the Office of Government Procurement and the manner in which it has driven savings through the system. Each Accounting Officer, that is, each person who is responsible for spending public money has complete responsibility for spending it. The OGP in no sense comes in and takes over his or her responsibility and nor does it police the individual contracts.

There is a huge amount of information out there on the contracting bodies and it would be desirable to be able to access it but that is a huge undertaking. In the national investment office, NIO, we have established a revised capital projects tracker under the spending review series. We have looked at a huge number of different areas of expenditure. We attempt to do a lot of ex postevaluation but, to be fair to the OGP and the people in it, they are in a position where their input is advisory and they help in driving a huge number of frameworks which Accounting Officers and organisations can make use of and a huge number of sourcing competitions, as we referred to in these statements. It may seem the OGP does not do things one might have thought it would do but that is because the responsibility for the spending of money rests with Accounting Officers and contracting parties. That is not to say we cannot improve it as we go along but it is important to know that. I hand over to Mr. Quinn to deal with the remainder of the Deputy's questions.