Mr. David O'Brien:

I will take technical specifications question first as I work on the construction side. Government policy around public works procurement is that we go to market with well-defined projects in the first place. In the majority of cases, we use a lump-sum contract. In order to do that, we have to define to a significant level of detail what we want the contractor to build. The capacity for the contractor to improve on the design is in marginal percentages in terms of what they can do. If they are to undertake significant change, that leads to a delay in the project. If we go to market with a more flexible approach, which is also an option under design and build, the contractor has far more scope to innovate. In those cases the weighting given to quality is much higher then it would be for price for design and build. Where we have a project that is already defined, the technical specifications go into great detail as to what the insulation products are to achieve and what the overall fabric of the building is to achieve in terms of energy performance. The capacity for the contractor to add significant value is smaller so that results in a lesser weighting given to quality.

As to the Senator’s question on cultural shift, earlier we were explaining how we introduced a reporting mechanism around embodied carbon. As the Senator probably knows, the operational carbon consumption in most of our buildings, certainly in terms of new build, is at nearly zero energy and we are heading towards zero energy. However, the embodied carbon is the key area that we need to tackle next. I said earlier we have a lack of data in certain areas around that. Many companies are not producing environmental product declarations, which is where all that important data sits. That is changing and we are seeing a significant shift in the numbers producing those.

As to the Senator's point about environmental performance and particularly the embodied carbon aspect in a tender competition, the difficulty we have is that with all the different products that go up to make a building, we need a significant level of data handling to be able to evaluate whether somebody is making a proposal that they claim is better with regard to its environmental performance. We need to have the data handling capacity to evaluate that in the tender process in as quick a time as possible. If we were relying on spreadsheets, data sheets and so on to do those calculations, it would not be possible.

Combined with the approach we are taking to reporting and the adoption of digital technologies, particularly building information modelling, it opens the scope to apply a much larger degree of scrutiny in the tender process but not currently, or not until we have a level of use in the digital space that we are all comfortable with.

We can focus on certain areas and some contracting authorities do. We might pick key elements of the building - the façade or the roof, whatever that might be, in terms of its energy performance. The technical specifications are where the core intent of the contracting authority are set out.