Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Ministers today. It is great to have them before the committee.

I congratulate both Ministers for their stewardship of the economy. While there are many challenges remaining, many of them are the challenges of success but there is a solid foundation, as they set out in the opening statement, to address many of those challenges. We have done a lot in the past few years and I expect there will be much more done in this budget and the next one.

I would like to ask about the public spending code. There is a question for me around the interface of policy-making and modelling and I have had a number of conversations with experts on this. As a system, we lean on cost-benefit analysis which is a kind of modelling but in many respects the models cannot capture many of the intangibles - the costs and the values of many decisions, particularly on capital spending. I would say that there should be acknowledgement that models cannot do that but there should still be provision for making decisions, accepting that there are intangibles. For example, time savings is probably one that a value can be put on but if it comes to a public transport project, how does one value the ability to be able to work on one's commute on a bus or train? There are all these other intangibles. There is induced demand - positive induced demand as well as negative induced demand. My concern is that, because the models are not an exact science, we lean too much on them and, therefore, we make decisions around major capital projects on what is not quite an exact science. There is lots of evidence of it. The counterargument is that we have to be prudent in how we spend public money. Of course, there is a good reason we have the public spending code. I am merely concerned that we perhaps lean too much on the models. My question is, how do we account for those aspects of projects? When it comes to sustainable projects, transport projects and other sustainable infrastructure, I would nearly argue that there should be a lower threshold for deciding whether these projects should be agreed because they are fundamentally good and when it comes to projects that perhaps are unsustainable the threshold should be higher. I would be interested to hear the Ministers' views on how we can reform the public spending code process and the modelling process such that we are less conservative and such that we capture many of these things that are difficult to measure.