Mr. Ronnie Downes:

I thank the Deputy for those questions. I will deal with them in turn.

Regarding social housing build and acquisition, the Deputy's point is that it would be perhaps useful to know about the separation between those and what underlies them. There are two ways we can progress that. One is that we can relay this feedback to our colleagues. We will take on board the Deputy's comments, certainly for the next iteration of the report, and relay that feedback to our colleagues in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. There is another way of addressing this, going back to my opening remarks. These indicators are being put forward by the Departments, including ours, as indicators that we think are useful. However, when it comes to having that performance dialogue, which is envisaged in the report the committee brought forward recently, with the relevant Departments, committee members should by all means have that discussion with colleagues in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and tell them what would be more useful for committee members to have broken down. We, for our part, will see what we can do.

Regarding the question about green budgeting and environmental budgeting, Deputy Farrell asked about some metrics that are being developed and the work that is under way in that regard. I mentioned in my opening remarks that we have worked with EU and OECD colleagues and have had some peer-to-peer or virtual visits with colleagues in other jurisdictions to see some approaches to integrating environmental indicators within the budgetary cycle. We are very much developing in that context. In the context of the ongoing work on the national development plan, as the Deputy mentioned, and regarding capital expenditure, we have been working closely with colleagues in the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications to make sure there is a strong environmental focus that permeates right through the national development plan. I will mention two specific initiatives. I guess they will be spelled out more fully when the NDP is brought forward in due course. One arises from some of our lessons from best international practice, including in the context of the Paris Collaborative on Green Budgeting. We are putting in place and have developed a process to conduct an environmental assessment or weighting of the different projects and programmes that are brought forward by each of the Departments in order that when it comes to the overall prioritisation and presentation of capital initiatives within the national development plan, that dimension can be taken systematically into account. Beyond the NDP, we will look to see whether and to what extent this type of systematic approach to assessing and weighting by reference to environmental criteria can be brought forward beyond capital to current expenditure also.

The second point about capital expenditure is that we are engaged in another initiative to improve and upgrade our public spending code still further. As the Deputy may be aware, we undertook a major update of the code and published it in late 2019. We are also conducting a specific analysis to see how, when it comes to conducting appraisals of capital projects, the technical appraisal can integrate those environmental dimensions in a way that is more structured and more specific than has been the case in the past. Those are two ways in which those environmental dimensions are being embedded into the capital side of things.

Deputy Farrell's final question related to overall capital expenditure and how Departments can be incentivised to spend. It is the case that there was a capital carryover into 2020 and a high capital carryover into 2021 arising in part from the shutdown in works that took place during the first lockdown. There are perhaps other issues that may be more specific to particular Departments and sectors. One of the number of initiatives that will be developed and spelled out further in the context of the final NDP report will be a range of measures to improve capacity and capability and to professionalise skills within our public sector capacity for delivery in the context of some of those supports at the centre, whether in procurement, as the Deputy mentioned, or public-private partnerships and some of the technical analysis around that. There is also other work on expert independent appraisal and how all this can be made more systematically available and more streamlined to develop that culture of professionalism. We are talking about approximately €10 billion in 2021 in capital expenditure, depending on what the NDP will come up with. It will be of that order of magnitude of capital expenditure just about every year for the next five to ten years. That requires that each Government Department and the system of how we interrelate with one another in the Civil Service and the public service are fit for purpose in making sure we can use that money in a timely way such that it delivers and has an impact as soon as possible for citizens. That is the agenda we are working to in the context of the NDP and beyond.