Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 June 2024

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Infrastructure Guidelines: Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform

Mr. Kevin Meaney:

No, it generally applies across the board. One flexibility more broadly is that we have included a wider approach for programmatic proposals, which was not in the public spending code from 2019. For that there are a couple of different Departments in particular that would regularly do a lot of similar projects, which are not of major scale but when grouped together come up to a major level. Housing and education would be two good examples. An intention of the guidelines is to allow them to come to us with a broad proposal as to how programmatic spend would be managed for smaller projects that would be quite large when grouped together. That is hopefully a step that can assist them, so they do not have to do similar business cases for similar projects repetitively. They can take a programmatic view of it if they are coming forward with a procurement of one bundle. They do not have to do multiple business cases to back it up.