Mr. Paul Quinn:

-----business either. We have to look at ensuring small businesses also have an opportunity so while we aggregate, we then disaggregate into lots and we allow lotting to happen to find the right kind of balance between those things. What it does do is it enables small bodies, typically, to benefit from the buying power of larger public bodies and that is where a lot of that happens. It does also become cyclical in that during better economic times, it is more difficult to deliver incremental savings and during tougher economic times, one generally finds markets are hungrier. It does become somewhat baked into the base and our savings numbers probably peaked in the early years. When I look at a breakdown year by year, which we will provided separately as the Deputy has requested, in 2016 and 2017 when the office got up and running at scale and we were delivering a lot of new frameworks for the public sector that people were buying into, we delivered a lot more in savings than we have done over the past number of years.

There are a lot of other benefits that accrue from the centralisation of public procurement other than simply saving money. It is part of the picture but it also enables things like secondary policies like green and social to be implemented. It give a far more credible offering out there to the markets that we know what we are about, that we are dealing with things in a much more professional way and it delivers a lot of administration savings because, as the Secretary General said earlier, all these individual public bodies were off doing their own thing - excuse the expression - whereas now, not only the OGP but our partners in the health system, in local government, in defence and education are procuring on behalf of the entire system and that reduces a lot of administration costs as well, which are available to public bodies.