Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The Minister's speech contained a self-congratulatory piece on competitiveness. While I welcome his introduction of that issue, Ministers have forgotten some of the hard lessons of the 1980s on the competitiveness challenge. We are a small open economy. Our success depends on being more alert, more agile and more competitive than our competitors. The Government has slipped into the economic equivalent of bad eating habits. It has reduced its exercising and does not want to believe what the weighing scales are showing. The Ministers continually come out with this mantra of the importance of being competitive and as we approach the partnership agreement it is vital to be competitive, but it is vital that they themselves are competitive.

Taking public sector pricing, since 2002 Government charges have increased by 86% — approximately eight times the consumer price index, CPI — and the price of public utilities has increased by 40% — approximately four times the CPI. While Ministers will always say their bit about the need to keep our wage costs competitive, they need to keep our public sector costs competitive. That is an important issue which the Minister and his colleagues are overlooking. Many people are quite bewildered to see electricity prices and gas prices rising by more that what is justified by international costs. The regulators are pushing these prices up and there is a scepticism growing regarding what exactly the Government is about.

Similar views exist about the Government's charges. After the general election there was a welter of these charges, resulting in significant upward pressure. The Minister's lecture is appropriate but it should be directed internally towards his 14 colleagues as well as externally towards the wider public.

Let us be blunt. Our economy is much more fragile than it has been for many years. I accept that the performance is strong, creating 90,000 jobs, but equally we have lost our share in export markets in successive years. This is the third year in a row in which we have lost export share. Our performance in the export markets is the worst since 1974. Construction's share of economic growth is unusually, most would say unsustainably, high. We are walking a tighter and higher wire than in the past. People can correctly state that the economic performance is still strong and the public finances are still strong. The Government deserves a share of the credit, not the exclusive credit which I hear some of the Minister's colleagues seeking to claim in imagining that all of us on this side of the House were spendthrifts and wastrels.

There are serious threats coming down the line and there is a sense that people are seeing the enterprise strategy, long the envy of other countries, creaking and cracks emerging. There are important jobs that the Minister must perform correctly and we must learn from the past. One of them is avoiding boom and bust fiscal strategies. It was crystal clear that in 2001 the fiscal strategy pursued by the Government of which the Minister was a member was seriously damaging to the economy. It was done with an eye to the election and we had to pay a heavy price afterwards. It was a serious mistake and there are worrying signs that the same sort of thinking is afoot again, with spending high this year and the SSIAs on a roll. We do not want to find that there is this froth in the economy over an 18-month period the residue of which would be a further ratcheting down of our competitiveness, more rip-off and more pressure on prices. That would be a serious blunder and unfortunately there are worrying signs that such is a feature of what is happening.

The Minister correctly called publicly for the delivery of value for money in the public sector but I cannot see that the action of his Government squares with his call. As I pointed out to him in the past, the expenditure review initiative has just collapsed. Big spending Departments like the Department of Health and Children and the decentralising OPW were exempted from expenditure review. The thinking of the Government is that one ought not bother with how the big guys, who are on a political mission of curing the health service or curing the regional strategy with this flawed decentralisation approach, are spending the money. That is what the Minister is saying and his officials have allowed happen. That is so wrong. It is so wrong that these big spending Departments, which have dominated public spending, should be allowed to not have those demands and scrutiny applied to them. The evaluation should be greater in the Department of Health and Children because that is a Department in which they have trebled the amount of public spending. The Minister is now giving €8,500 for every family to the health service, that is, three times more than what was being given when they took power. Then one finds that he has decided to exempt the Department from expenditure scrutiny. It is indefensible. It is not surprising then that one sees bad value for money. The Minister admitted it. He stated that some of the way in which the health service has been run is totally wrong and some of the agreements in place are totally wrong, and yet he is not putting them under scrutiny and making people accountable for those poor performances. The Minister is on the right track in saying value for money is the core issue but he is not doing the jobs that need to be done to make it happen. There needs to be a much tougher line of approach in getting performance delivery. He is talking about having a system but he states it will not be until 2007 that we will begin to see what Departments are doing with their money. There has been such a litany of projects suffering from poor evaluation and poor project management. The list is well known to all of us. It includes PPARS, Media Lab Europe and the Punchestown project. There is an endless list of projects where evaluation systems and project management systems, which should have been running well and which we learnt from Europe, have been allowed rust. That has happened on the watch of the Minister and his colleagues.

Equally, the Government is not delivering in the key infrastructural areas. We have lost our lead in telecommunications and ports. Ireland is bottom of the leagues on ports, broadband and electricity availability. We have lost ground and we are still unable to spend. While I agree with the Minister that he should spend 5% of GNP, over the past three years he is €2,500 million off that target. He is not bringing forward bankable, decent public projects to tackle our infrastructure deficit in a timely way. Many of these basic measures to make his slogans of "value for money" and "competitiveness" a reality, are not being taken.

The same may be said in the case of fostering competition in sheltered sectors. That should be a core approach of Government but the Minister has ducked it, for example, on bus services where there was to be competition. His ministerial colleague, Deputy Brennan, the former Minister for Transport, was going to have bus competition three years ago. Senator O'Rourke, who preceded Deputy Brennan as Minister, was going to have it five years ago. Here we are in 2006 and nothing has happened in that regard. The Government is continually backing off from creating competitiveness within the sheltered sector and if the Government does not get its act together, we will pay dearly for that too.

Much of what the Minister states is correct, but he is acting far too timidly and is not reforming the way his colleagues do business in the way necessary to achieve the results sought. The Bill would scarcely merit more than a poor pass if marked out of ten.

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