Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Downes. That is very informative. I am just conscious that my time is running away from me so I will ask my other few questions together and then give Mr. Downes an opportunity to respond.

Regarding housing, the whole point of this performance report is that it increases transparency and accountability and ensures that every citizen can see clearly how public funds are being used. On that basis and on those principles, the principles of the report, the housing section reports the "total number of units delivered through Social Housing build and acquisition programmes". This is not by any means unique to this report; the lumping together of social housing builds with housing acquisitions into a single metric is something we see time and time again. However, building and acquisition are two very different things. In future could we see these two presented separately so we can see what is actually being built rather than what is being acquired? In the interests of transparency and for citizens to see how public funds are used, that would be really important. I know this report has been reformed in recent years, so I hope that perhaps in the next report these two things, social housing builds and social housing acquisitions, will be accounted for separately. I would like Mr. Downes's views on that.

As for the Department's approach to green budgeting, there are three pages focused on this. The first two pages mainly explain what green budgeting is and the principles that underlie it. The last page of this part notes: "Over the course of 2021, DPER will work with those Departments responsible for climate and environmental related expenditures to develop ... metrics that are meaningful." My question relates to the development of such metrics, particularly as it relates to capital expenditure. We know that capital expenditure is budgeted to rise, and it is fair to assume that sizeable amounts of this will be on what can be referred to as green investment. It seems to me, therefore, that we need some metric that can link capital expenditure on green infrastructure to our emissions target, as per the new climate Bill. Can Mr. Downes tell us about any work that has been done in this regard?

I have one question about capital expenditure. I see on page 7 of the report that gross capital expenditure for 2020 was just shy of €9 billion. The stability programme update, SPU, states that gross capital expenditure in 2020 was budgeted to be €11.5 billion. Could Mr. Downes advise on this difference? Was it the significant carryover cost? Will the Department put in place measures to ensure that each Department will be incentivised to spend its allocation? We heard reports at the weekend that the Minister was concerned about ensuring that the capital expenditure is actually spent.