Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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Let us take the children's hospital as a prime example of where - I do not blame the contractor, by the way - the budget was not right at the start. The design was not right and things have evolved from there. The contractor is just doing his duty. If he builds something where there is a change order, he has to get paid for it. What happens is that when you have a project of which ends up going that way, every other project then gets screwed in that those involved cannot do anything because of what happened in that instance. There is too much regulation. The default position is that because it is public money we have to protect it, but the undercurrent of that is that we are spending public money trying to protect public money. We end up spending more than we are protecting, if I can put it that way.

Does the Department have any input into the types of contracts that are used in respect, for example, of public private partnerships, PPPs, or the like? What kind of guidelines does it provide when it comes to projects of that nature? Who prepares the guidelines? The HSE built a number of primary care centres across the country. The PPP company involved owns these buildings and decides everything relating to them. Has any appraisal been done of that contract and will it ever be used again?

In one of the primary care centres in Tuam the design did not include an X-ray facility, which was a design brief omission, but then it was decided to put it in afterwards. The money was allocated in 2017 and, lo and behold, about two months ago, it opened. It was a job that could have been done during the course of the works but it could not be done because the contract would not allow it. It could not be done after the project was handed over either because the final account was not agreed. It was only after that point that negotiations could start with the PPP company about putting in an X-ray facility. It probably cost €700,000 or maybe even €1 million when it could have been done during the course of construction for a fraction of the amount. In addition, if a doctor wants to go into the primary care centre after 12 noon on a Saturday, he or she will not get in because the people who manage the place have a contract with the PPP company to finish at 12 noon and that is it. That is an area that needs rigorous attention from the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform to ensure that when we do spend €20 million – I do not know how many millions were spent in all of these cases, but we ended up in a situation where we have lost control of them - we cannot decide on anything without negotiating it with the PPP company, which seems to be a scandal in its own right.

We are overly prescriptive. We are great at creating guidelines and whatever else, some of which put more pressure on the local authorities that need more resources to deal with the guidelines. The job is left to one side as the paperwork has to be right, which is creating a huge waste of public money rather than doing the opposite. We have tipped over the cliff with what we are doing at the moment. We need a complete overhaul of public contracts at this stage. What we have now is worse than what we had before public sector contracts were brought in.