Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 July 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Changes to Public Spending Code: Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform

Mr. Kevin Meaney:

There are a lot of delivery entities so the Department of Transport is putting in place sectoral guidelines that make sense for the types of projects that it delivers. Obviously, it is up to the agencies to bring cases forward under those sets of guidelines. Our colleagues in the Department of Health have progressed a lot of work, particularly in terms of the prioritisation framework that it has put in place for capital projects, which it did not have in place before 2019. That is new and a new team has been set up in the Department of Health to provide a greater challenge to its delivery agencies, in particular the HSE. The Department of Education, which was reviewed earlier this year, has a particular programmatic approach to school buildings, so it delivers a lot of similar-type projects.