Mr. Derek Tierney:

I will provide a follow-up note. To re-cover some of the ground dealt with with the Chair, we have taken a different procurement strategy. We are not delivering the maternity hospital with a single contractor doing both enabling works and main works. We have separated enabling works completely from the future main works. They are already under way and we expect to finish by mid-year next year. Within the tender for the main works, there is always a question about design completeness. It is a client design for the maternity hospital but we subject that to two independent verifications by independent third parties. We take the best of assurance around design completeness and the bill of quantities matches the design that we go out to tender with. As part of the business case construct and, ultimately, in getting to a baseline cost, we are now obligated under the infrastructure guidance, which was the public spending code, to subject the business case to an external assurance review by an independent third party, and a major projects advisory group on behalf of the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform will also scrutinise it.

Before we get into a contract with anybody, we will have a six-month pre-service contract period where we bring the main contractor and the reserve specialists together with the designer to ensure that everybody is completely aligned on what it is we have asked the contractor to deliver. We have changed some elements of the contract, particularly around the entitlement to claims. Currently, on this project, the claim trigger is €500, that is, anything that could potentially add a time delay or cost value delay of €500, but we are stepping that up to €2,500.