Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

An interdepartmental agency group was established in 2017 to review Ireland's experience of PPPs and to make recommendations on their future role in the context of the new ten-year national development plan, NDP. The NDP summarises the key findings and recommendations agreed as part of the PPP review, the detailed report of which will be published shortly.

One of the recommendations of the review, included in the NDP, is that consideration of PPP as a procurement option should be assessed on a level playing field with the traditional procurement option.  In this context, the cap on PPP costs of 10% of the aggregate Exchequer capital allocation in any particular year is to be discontinued in favour of reintroducing the original budgetary control mechanism for PPPs. This approach was also recommended by the International Monetary Fund, IMF, in the public investment management assessment, PIMA, report for Ireland published last year.

Following this review, and in light of the very substantial new public capital investment programme contained in the NDP, it is now recommended that the original budgetary control mechanism for PPPs should be reapplied.  This requires that the capital value of PPPs over the construction period should be charged to the Exchequer capital allocation of the sponsoring Department so that PPPs and traditionally procured projects are treated equally when determining which procurement option to adopt. In other words, Departments will only use PPPs when they offer value for money over traditional procurement.

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