Mr. Aidan Sweeney:

Regarding IBEC's approach to the size of companies and SMEs, we typically adopt the approach that an SME is one that has approximately 50 employees or fewer. That is for our thinking on strategy, although we are conscious of the 250 employees and below and the €40 million turnover according to the European criteria. With regard to micro businesses and to pick up a point raised earlier, there is a lack of statistical analysis.

We will be pushing in the Action Plan for Jobs next year for a detailed economic assessment of the public sector market in Ireland, taking into account all the different actors, the dynamics of micro enterprises versus SMEs versus multinationals but also supply-based businesses and those that may be manufacturing. There is an urgent need to get that analysis out there to determine the policies that need to be addressed.

In regard to Circular 10/14 being largely ignored, it was published in April this year. Based on the experience of circular 10/10, from our anecdotal evidence, many of the clauses ignored are not applied in a consistent manner. From our involvement with Circular 10/14 this time we have not seen any data on its performance and we would call for the OGP to monitor its implementation across all public sector bodies. It is a start. An issue to which I wish to draw attention because of the reference we made to the use of prequalification criteria, is a clause on the use of open tendering below threshold, below €134,000. One of the areas where it is necessary to get more SMEs involved and flexible in the approach and would reduce the cost of bidding would be to encourage the use of open tendering above threshold. Ireland, the UK and Denmark are, by and large, the largest users of the restricted procurement approach. That is one of four broad approaches we conduct. I would like to see more use of open tendering.

As Circular 10/14 is a guidance to all public sector bodies we would like to see the Office of Government Procurement and Government publish an SME procurement statement aimed at companies about what they can expect when bidding. This could be followed up. For instance, it is adopted in places across the US and other public sector bodies where there is a visible section on the websites of public bodies on how to do business with us, who would be purchasing, how one could approach it and what criteria one could expect. This could be a way of getting more visibility and communication out there on it. The major issue with Circular 10/14 is communication, getting out there and monitoring it. It is clear that the use of standardised terms and conditions in the document produced for general goods and services in 2011 have been applied on a consistent basis and have been applied for contracts but the contracts themselves were never so designed. We see them increasingly in the IT space. They were for general goods and services and not for anything more specific.