Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

In the past eight years the Government has increased spending by an incredible amount, some 142%. This represents an increase of €17,000 in spending for every household in the State. The crux of the issue is do people see the value for that extra increase? The blunt answer is no. It is not just political opponents who claim this. Real indicators such as access to primary health care show this to be the case. A person on the minimum wage is now deemed to be too wealthy to be given a medical card. Fewer people attend accident and emergency departments, but those who do face greater chaos in the service. More people are on waiting lists for affordable housing, as those on low incomes simply cannot get on the housing ladder. Garda detection rates and drug seizures are down. Rates for violent assault and crime on the streets are up dramatically. The proportion of students dropping out of school is at the same persistently high level it has been for years. The standards of care for the elderly have not improved. No services are improving to match the huge scale of spending people are asked to come up with.

By contrast, the public sees a chronicle of overruns, waste, ministerial pet projects going sour and poor efforts to protect the taxpayer when deals are struck. We need to get to the bottom of this. A system that protects the taxpayer must be developed. There is no doubt that waste has surged because in the good years, those two years up to the last election, spending controls went out of control under the then Minister for Finance, Mr. McCreevy. The systems to protect the taxpayer became rusted. Basic principles were abandoned.

One can see patterns in how this happened. Budget day glamour announcements were one of the main factors with items such as the over-70s medical cards, the pre-1953 pension provision and, most notably, the decentralisation programme. The latter was to cost €20 million but tomorrow we will hear more a figure of €900 million. It is a deception to present projects that have not been properly costed, analysed or evaluated.

Political pet projects, driven by ministerial ambition have been another problem. We have seen the Media Lab case of €36 million spent with nothing to show for it. We have seen the Campus and Stadium Ireland project with much work done but nothing to show for it. We have seen the Punchestown Event Centre, a pet project of the former Minister for Finance, Mr. McCreevy, barged through every procedure that any responsible Minister for Finance ought to respect and protect. We have seen bad deals negotiated with no regard for the taxpayers' needs. The West Link bridge negotiations, recently analysed, showed taxpayers were not protected against the downside risk. We have seen poor project evaluation time and again.

When infrastructure projects came up for evaluation a rosy picture of the benefits and wildly optimistic impressions of the costs were given. However, designers changed their minds halfway through because many projects were not properly designed. This has happened on major road and other projects. Right across the board, those same mistakes have been repeated. It is not just good enough for the Government to shrug and say these are confined examples of projects going wrong when, overall, it is achieving wonderful projects and to stop the begrudgery. This is money that costs the taxpayer dear, putting people on ordinary incomes to the pin of their collars to pay, mainly in spending taxes.

The Comptroller and Auditor General's report highlights, time and again, computer systems, clearly designed without a proper understanding of their clients' needs. The designers did not consult the hospital, prison service or special needs users but ploughed ahead with a computer system that fell flat on its face.

Tax breaks have been introduced without any proper evaluation of their benefits or costs and we know that many of them have been used solely for the great benefit of a few very wealth taxpayers. The Revenue Commissioners estimate that €200 million goes in property based tax benefits and 100 individuals took €74 million of that sum in each of the years evaluated. No intention of that kind was ever intended by the Dáil. The measures were never properly designed to protect the taxpayers' interests and this constitutes waste of the worst kind.

Currently, the Dáil does not have the capacity to get to grips with the task of handling public spending and tackling the waste that occurs. The Dáil must be reinforced. Budget day is a charade or a political bearpit that has allowed projects to pass that should never have been presented in such a way because no evaluation had been carried out on them. Estimates are passed without any indication of the impact they might have on key performance indicators. The horse trading exercise of the Estimates process is not designed to reward efficiency. The opposite is the case and under the current Estimates process, crises and bad management are more likely to deliver more money to the spending Department than good management. That is ridiculous. It happens because there is no demand that money must follow performance. This must be changed.

In the document, Who Cares?, Fine Gael has already tried to set out some of the changes we will make. With the Labour Party, we have begun the process of identifying the many changes that must be made. For instance, the Estimates process must be changed so that performance against key targets drives spending allocations. No one should get extra money without performing to commitments.

The Comptroller and Auditor General's mandate must be changed. It is not good enough simply to report on money that has gone astray. The Comptroller and Auditor General must change the corporate governance in Departments and agencies so that it does not happen again. The Government must give him a mandate to strengthen corporate governance. We must have an independent unit in the Department of Finance to provide technical support and perform stress tests on the rosy evaluations coming from departmental and ministerial pet projects. It is not good enough that the Minister for Finance steps back and declares that it is a delegated responsibility. We have an interest in seeing that the proper systems are in operation.

Deputy Deasy, who travelled with the Committee of Public Accounts to the United States, will deal with the issue of giving the Dáil greater access to more impartial information of the type that is routinely available to members of Congress. We must also examine our tax breaks and must have a system of annual scrutiny with the actual costs and benefits listed. I hope and am confident that the Minister will do something in that regard. We must have responsibility pinned on individuals, be it Ministers or senior managers. One cannot produce major policy initiatives without standing over the analysis underpinning them. Clearly, in the case of many ministerial projects, the analysis was not performed. People flew by the seat of their pants and then shunned responsibility when things went wrong. That is not acceptable. It is not being accountable in accordance with the mandate given by the electorate. We must see those sorts of changes and I hope we get the opportunity in Government to make those changes if the Minister does not respond.

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