Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)

I thank the Senator for those questions and his interest in this topic. His first question was regarding the policy decisions that are made in the Office of Government Procurement and whether they are in law. It depends. We have EU legislation that we have transposed into Irish law. In that case, it is absolutely a legal requirement. Then we have other circulars, which Cabinet will have approved, that go to other Departments and those are directives from Cabinet. It is not law but it is a circular and that is what people abide by.

Regarding policies, we have a lot of policy guidance out there and that is guidance. However, I cannot stress enough that we have an awful lot of expertise in the Office of Government Procurement who are there to help any Department or any State agency that has any questions or concerns or needs a bit of support when it comes to tendering or running mini-competitions. Our office is there to support them through that. We also have the sourcing division, which I spoke about earlier. It is there to make sure we are delivering value for money from a taxpayer's perspective and getting a benefit from economies of scale.

On the social and ethical, yes, a social focus already exists. I recently did workshops in each of the regions. We were in Cork recently and Athlone and Dublin over the last number of months. Some of the feedback I got was that, from a social perspective, it may not be clear what is considered social and what those guidelines are. That is the kind of feedback we are now looking to loop into our first ever national procurement strategy, which we are drafting. We are doing that on the basis of feedback from all of our stakeholders and that was one of the pieces of feedback that came up, in particular from those in social enterprises, whose attendance was high.

From an ethical perspective, I take this opportunity to commend our Office of Government Procurement, which recently received a Kitemark in ethical procurement. All of our OGP team members have undergone training in ethical procurement. That is really important because they are the people providing expert advice to other Departments on this. There is absolutely a focus on social and ethical. In response to the Senator’s first question, it is a mix of law and Government advice.