Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the officials for coming in and for their presentation. I have a number of problems with what is going on at the moment. As someone who comes from a quantity surveying background, I think some things have gone off the Richter scale entirely. Has the Department ever costed the time and effort that goes into these procurement guidelines? Are they factored in anywhere? For example, if there is a project to build a road or to build houses and, four years later, they are still not built but have gone through a seesaw of processes with all of the consultants involved looking into it and doing reports, has that ever been costed as a percentage of the overall spend on our national development plan?

At a very high level the officials inform the Minister for public expenditure and reform. These are tools to help him know what is being spent and if it is within guidelines or whatever. However, it then goes to the next level. For example, if Galway County Council is building a housing scheme or Galway City Council is building a footbridge over the Corrib, those local authorities might need to go through 13 gateways of approval before getting machinery on the ground on a project. They need to spend considerable time, money and resources in answering to the Department, whichever Department it is, at every stage. For instance, if they want to appoint a design team, they must get approval to do that. They have to get approval before they do the tender for the design team. They then need to get approval at design stages throughout the project after that.

It is creating a sea of activity going up and down between the Department and the local authority wherever it might be in the country. Whether it is housing, roads or whatever, it is creating all this stuff going up and down with consultants being employed to do all the reports that are needed. Is anybody looking at the cost and the time taken there and saying, "Hold on a minute"? We have gone from no regulation to being totally over-regulated and now we are paralysing ourselves. We cannot do anything we need to do until we have four or five years of paperwork lashed together and then some jobs get through. Given the high inflation in construction, are we not wasting money at the moment?