Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 4 April 2019

Public Accounts Committee

2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 24 - Justice and Equality

9:00 am

Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

Exactly. This is an important point. We are now rolling it out throughout the country. Obviously, it is a process of change from the old system.

On value for money, we are now in a position to start comparing the results of tendering with those from the original approach of negotiation. I do not want to draw a firm conclusion on this yet, but a preliminary conclusion is that there is not a huge saving. It is difficult to judge because we are constantly raising the standards that we require. The standards under the new tender system are higher than they would have been under the old negotiated system.