Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his question. What I told his colleague at yesterday's committee meeting was that a commitment was made last year to review the public spending code, in order to see if we could increase the threshold from €2 million to €6 million. Doing that would require a derogation to the public spending code, which would have to come from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Upon review of what doing that would actually mean, I met with the county and city managers this morning to talk about housing delivery for this year. We will deliver 10,000 new homes into the social housing stock this year, which is a huge improvement on previous years. Increasing the threshold might save six to eight weeks on our timelines, but we would also risk delaying projects even longer, and in doing so, the Department would lose oversight of 44% of the capital budget for housing. That is too much of a risk. We want to make sure that we are properly overseeing capital spending on behalf of taxpayers. I said yesterday that it would be reckless to lose oversight of more than 44% of the housing budget, and that is why the plan is currently not proceeding.

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