Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The Social Democrats are not opposing this Bill which is the annual housekeeping Bill. This year and last year were very exceptional years, obviously. Because it was so exceptional, it is very hard to do any comparisons or to talk about controls to any great extent. Nonetheless, some of the figures warrant some commentary.

There are some stand-out areas, particularly health and social protection. Obviously, last year the country found itself in an extreme emergency and decisions needed to be taken very quickly. In the main, the decisions that were taken in the early months of the pandemic were correct. Substantial spending was needed in the health area. The Government needed to step in regarding creating a single-tier health service. It needed to step in to provide income support for many people who lost their jobs and to provide support for businesses. That was all the right thing to do and we had no choice at the time. However, it happened at some cost to the public purse. In the health area, for example, we had the issue with very expensive ventilators that were never used and nobody knows exactly where they are. There was also an issue about a large quantity of personal protective equipment, PPE, which was delivered but found to be substandard and could not be used.

The Comptroller and Auditor General produced a report on the ventilators. Is the Minister proposing any kind of formal look-back into decisions on some of that enormous spending? It was done to a certain extent in the UK. Some of the findings relating to people who got business out of it were very damaging to the government there. There was considerable internal lobbying and insider dealing, as it were, relating to some of those contracts. Hopefully, at some point in the new year things will settle down. It would be good practice to do a look-back and see what lessons can be learned from those decisions. It is not all about laying blame for mistakes that were made; we need to understand the exceptional circumstances at the time. We need to learn lessons from that to ensure proper procedures are followed and good controls are in place. I ask the Minister to consider that.

In looking at some of the figures in Schedule 1, other points that come to mind are, for example, the Courts Service where appropriations-in-aid amount to in excess of 25% of the figure for the supply grants. Why is that the case? Was there a major problem with the original Estimates? Why is that figure so high? The same comment would apply to the Probation Service where the appropriations-in-aid amount to in excess of 20%. Do these figures indicate particular problems in the Department of Justice? Is there an underestimation of the spending required? Why did that Department have substantial additional spending?

There is not a substantial additional spend in the Office of Government Procurement, which should ring some alarm bells. I drew attention to this in my comments on last year's Appropriation Bill. We all share a concern about weaknesses in our procurement system. That principally relates to the lack of strong expertise in that office even though a special office was set up for Government procurement. Where there have been particularly egregious overspends, there is a certain shrugging of shoulders with people saying that is the way it is and maybe we were not careful enough. The amounts of money involved in a weak procurement system have enormous repercussions for the public purse.

The stand-out ones are obviously the children's hospital and the broadband plan, for example. When it comes to public procurement, why can we not learn the lessons from the private sector, particularly in the case of the children's hospital? It has been known that the right way to do procurement is to have a very clear overall specification in the beginning before going to tender and to have all the detail nailed down. If the tender document is vague, inevitably there will be substantial changes as the project goes on and each change costs very dearly. We have not got that right in many areas of Government procurement.

It is often said that we have done better with public private partnerships, PPPs. While ostensibly we may have, the initial test of an estimate for the cost of a major public project is to benchmark against how it would be costed in a private sector model. When a PPP project gets the go-ahead, very often we need to subsequently increase the allocation. For example, substantial additional subvention had to be made to a company operating a motorway because an error was made in calculating the level of traffic and therefore the receipts from tolls.

There is huge room for improvement in public procurement. I would have liked to have seen that office beefed up a lot more. When things settle down, maybe the Minister will pay more attention to that area so that there are much tighter controls of spending on major capital projects.

The OPW is being allocated €13 million in appropriations-in-aid. Under that heading, I wish to raise the chestnut I have been pursuing for the past few years, which is the error the OPW made in the rent payable for the Miesian Plaza, the headquarters for the Departments of Health and of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The OPW admitted it made a mistake in measuring the floor area of that facility to the extent that there is an underpayment of rent to the tune of approximately €10 million over the course of the lease. I have been asking about this issue for the past couple of years and there does not seem to have been any progress on it. We are spending approximately €344,000 extra per annum. That is an awful lot of money and there is a need to progress this matter. I raise this issue every six months or so and I am told that the Department hopes to meet the landlord to discuss it and negotiate, but no progress has been made. While the Minister of State has answered for this in the past, there does not seem to have been much progress. Resolving that should be a priority, as should ensuring the public purse is not taken to the cleaners to the extent that it would be if something is not done about drawing back that additional €10 million.

Under the heading of deferred surrender relating to capital services, there are a few standout issues. Obviously, the impact of Covid on construction and so on must be borne on mind, but almost €58 million is to be deferred by the office of the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications. In the context of addressing the issue of climate change and the need for substantial spending on the area of retrofitting, that is a significant deferral of capital. The Department of Transport is deferring €161 million when there is demand for additional capacity in the area of transport. While there may have been some reason for delays in major construction works, there is a need for substantial numbers of additional buses. I am concerned about the amount being handed back and deferred to the coming year's budget.

On the approach to spending, we need to learn lessons from what happened in recent years when the weaknesses in our public services were very much exposed, particularly last year but also this year. In health service, there was substantial undercapacity in a general sense with regard to beds, staff, and high-dependency and ICU beds. That resulted in the need for a substantial additional spend due to bringing in private hospitals. In the area of housing, there were issues with high rents and homelessness, and a substantial additional sum was spent on those kinds of emergency services. This again exposed the fact that our services were inadequate in the first place. The State had to step in in childcare. There were so many areas where the State had to step in, which was an indication that the State's role had not been adequate in the provision of key public services. Lessons must be learned from that. There must be an approach that is about investing in key, high-quality public services that impact people's lives.

It is disappointing to hear the Minister for Finance making promises of tax cuts in the coming years. This, coincidentally, followed on from poor poll results for the two main Government parties. People are not fooled by promises of tax cuts. Several polls have shown that people do not want to be bribed. They want high-quality public services they can depend on and a strong social contract whereby they pay taxes according to their means and, in return, they get decent good-quality universal public services. That is the formula by which successful societies and economies operate. We need to learn those lessons. The other point of doing this is that not only does it ensure better quality of life for people and access to public services that are free at the point of use, but it also means wage demands are dampened. Due to housing being in crisis for many years, the cost of housing, be it buying or renting, is a major driver in wage demands as is, to a lesser extent, the cost of access to health services. Many people feel they have to fork out for expensive private health insurance. There are significant out-of-pocket expenses for seeing a GP or a consultant and diagnostic tests irrespective of whether they have insurance. This is a big contributor to a high-cost of living and fuels wage demands, as is the high cost of childcare, though I recognise the start and progress made in next year's budget. However, they are all the lessons we should learn from.

Going forward, spending should be guided by the principle of spending to save. In housing, there are many areas where that principle should be followed. The Government should spend money on social housing to save itself from the crazy expensive long-term leases that it enters into and to save itself from the high cost of the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme. The long-term leases are absolutely the worst such as the 25-year leases whereby the State pays the equivalent of a high mortgage for an apartment and after 25 years it has to refurbish it and hand it back. That makes no financial sense whatsoever. The approach has to be spend to save. The Government should invest in co-operative housing and social housing. The cost of housing can be driven down where the State owns public land, and there is plenty of public land for that purpose. That approach must be taken thereby not leaving it all to the market.

On health, investment in Sláintecare is about investing to save. It is about a lower cost model of care in which most healthcare is provided locally at community level, where it is most effective and the most cost-effective, and local services such as local primary care centres and so on are invested in. The heat is taken out of the cost of healthcare. Healthcare is provided at the least complex level locally in communities, thereby reducing the pressure on the expensive hospital sector.

They need to be accepted as guiding principles. There are lessons to be learned from the past two difficult years. Hopefully, next year will not be as hard, although it is an unknown quality at this stage. We have to learn lessons from the experience of the past two years.

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