Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Downes and his team for attending today. I will confine my remarks to a number of straight questions. When we talk about budgetary oversight, the way we spend money and if we are getting value for the money we spend, an issue related to housing that increasingly comes to mind is the amount of money we spend on the housing assistance payment scheme and what return we will get from that in the long term. That is my first question.

I will move on to capital expenditure. Deputy Durkan mentioned the procurement process. I believe we have created a procurement process which has created a procurement industry in its own right. We have created something that is not giving us any more value for money. We seem to have over-complicated the process, introduced a great number of rules and regulations and distanced ourselves from the smaller suppliers and contractors in the regions who have walked away from public contracts on the basis that the process is too complicated and they could not be bothered with it. We are not getting value for money in the long term because local businesses which were sponsoring events in schools or communities are being excluded. When one wants to buy photocopying paper one must buy it centrally from some place in the country and get it delivered and one does not know what quality of it will be or if left short of an item one does not know who to contact, and the threat is if that one does not comply with the process one will lose one's capitation grant.

On the capital expenditure side, the public private partnership contracts we have put in place leave a great deal of liability with the State. The witnesses might give their view on that. I will cite a good example of that. The capital build of the 14 primary care centres in this country has left the HSE without any control over the buildings. I can vouch for that. The HSE cannot change anything structurally in the buildings for the next 25 years without, first, getting the permission of the public private partnership company and, second, getting a cost from it on it. Something has gone wrong on that. That public private partnership process took three years. It was going to deliver everything and anything and now when it has been worked out I wonder how we will measure that. For instance, currently the public private partnership company is refusing to allow a water main to go through a site which is owned by the HSE to service another HSE site. What is going on is baffling.

Public works contracts need to be examined and addressed. We have created public works contracts which are very adversarial and confrontational and they are not achieving what they set out to achieve, which was certainty in terms of cost, time and quality. It is now the norm for those in the construction industry to go to mediation, conciliation and arbitration. That must be a fantastic business for people who are in that game but such conciliation or arbitration must be costing the State, the taxpayer and public purse a great deal of money and that money should be spent on building structures.

We are coming out of a pandemic and there are major inflationary pressures in terms of capital works and how they will be delivered. How do we measure or consider that as we start to spend money into the future?

Will the carryover that we have had for the past two years, when we did not have public spend, be spent? My entire frustration is based around the fact that the day it is decided to do a capital project, it takes on average about seven years before we get a contractor on site. Something has gone wrong that was not there 20 years ago. We have created a huge plethora of paperwork and mini-industries within the industries. How can we unravel that and what is the Department's take on that?