Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Office of Government Procurement, OGP, is the office responsible for public procurement.

The OGP Vote for 2014 was €12.4 million, of which €6.7 million was transferred from the Office of Public Works, OPW, for the national procurement service and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform's, DPER's, national public procurement policy unit.

Actual spend in 2014 was €6.1 million; we allocated €12.4 million but actually spent €6.1 million. A total of €6.3 million returned to the Exchequer, which was mainly due to the delays in recruitment of staff to the OGP, which impacted the pay bill. The total allocated for 2015 is €18.9 million. Expenditure for next year will be a matter for the Estimates process.

The OGP is still at an early stage of operation, having recruited the majority of its resources through 2015. Setting up the OGP will develop capacity to enable better value for taxpayers, better management of risk for the State and better management of suppliers. The OGP sourcing teams have completed 68 projects this year to date capturing an estimated annual spend of €1.3 billion. They are currently working on 187 active projects across all eight categories with an estimated value of €720 million.

In July, the OGP published an updated target schedule of contracts and frameworks giving public sector bodies and the markets a nine month horizon of planned OGP sourcing activity from the third quarter this year to quarter 1 next year.  This enables the markets to plan their bidding in a much more structured way. Savings enabled this year by the OGP and sector sourcing organisations are estimated at €66 million, with a balance of €58 million savings being enabled next year.

In March 2015, I launched a report entitled Public Service Spend and Tendering Analysis for 2013, which provided, for the first time, an examination of detailed non-pay expenditure for a large portion of the public service.  This has brought much needed data to policymakers and to the markets. It is planned to issue a similar report for 2014 before the end of this year.

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