Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending. I formally second the Bill and commend Senator Higgins on bringing it forward. It is an incredible Bill that will have an immeasurable impact on people's lives through how the State engages in the public procurement process. It is a testament to Senator Higgins and her drive for positive reform in this sometimes complex and technical area.I pay tribute also to Ciara Gaynor and Janet Horner in our office for all their work to get the Bill to this point.

Getting the process by which the State tenders, vets and awards contracts to companies in the private sector for the provision of State services right is important in many areas. Ethical, fair and balanced public procurement is key to fostering public confidence, ensuring the State leads the way on the use of procurement to advance human rights and equality and ensuring we do not take a short-term perspective for a short-term financial saving which, in fact, ends up costing more and more in future. Procurement may be a complex process in itself, but the end result impacts on the lives of citizens in incredibly intimate and important ways. While the Bill may involve a great deal of jargon and appear, on the surface, simply to change the balance in assessing the ratio across price, cost and quality, it is actually about immeasurable improvements in the real lives of people who interact with the firms we contract through public procurement. The Bill is not prescriptive about who should be awarded contracts. Rather, it sets the philosophical underpinnings according to which those choices should be made. As such, we say quality, accessibility for disabled persons and sensitivity to the experiences of minority communities, including migrants, LGBT people and Travellers, are just as important as financial costs and just as valuable in the achievement of excellence and confidence in our public procurement process. This area may be full of complicated processes and various oversight and accountability measures but at its heart, it is about people and making their lives and experiences better and safer while providing higher quality services. That is why the Bill is so important. It seeks to create a shift in culture where we end the race to the bottom and start to think about public procurement in a new way.

The Bill is not about simply saving ourselves money for the coming budget but about a commitment to valuing the quality of goods and services. If the State cannot be everywhere and do everything, it is the people we choose and the goods we select through public procurement that will make up the foundations of our motorways, food for our schoolkids and the processing of our most personal and private data. Public procurement cannot and should not just be about how to spend as little money as possible in the here and now. It should be about building a process that can look 20 years into the future when assessing costs while learning from past mistakes to ensure procurement processes grow and develop. In the procurement process for once-in-a-generation projects such as those under the national development plan, we must set ambitious targets in the weight we give procurement quality. We will not get a second chance. Price should not be the be-all and end-all when decisions are made as to who will build our schools and hospitals, feed our kids in schools and administer important parts of our health service. Personally, I do not want the only thing to matter in who we choose to be how low they dared to bid for a contract. I want to know that when a procurement officer decides who is to get a contract, he or she has the well-being of my children in mind and is thinking about our domestic and international human rights and equality commitments, not seeking only to make an immediate saving for the Exchequer. I want officials to take a long-term perspective and to consider properly the importance of the quality of the services being tendered.

At the briefing on the Bill in the audiovisual room yesterday, it was stated that everyone who had been involved in public life or the provision of services in Ireland would have many examples of bad public procurements which they wish could have been avoided. They would not have proceeded if they had known how they would turn out. I am sure the Senators present can think of examples. Could they have been prevented by a Bill like this? Could the CervicalCheck errors have been avoided if a Bill like this had governed the public procurement process that outsourced those checks? Today is the first anniversary of those errors becoming public knowledge. Could the lives and health of the women involved have been safeguarded if quality of procurement had been mandated as of equal importance as cost? I sit on the education committee where we investigated the failings by Western Building Systems, which led to 42 schools being assessed in respect of their structural safety. My daughter was a student in one of those. I want my daughter to go to school in a building that is warm, comfortable and safe, not one that was built as a result of a race to the bottom for the lowest-cost bid and which may simply fall down. Could the building errors have been avoided if quality was given as much weight as price? We will never know. However, the Bill will go some way to safeguarding against catastrophic errors like this in future. Even when it comes to the food served in schools, hospitals, direct provision centres and our prisons, I do not want contracts awarded on the basis of the lowest cost. Nutrition is an important area where even small increases in cost can result in huge increases in quality. I want to know considerations like this are required to be factored into a procurement process.

I thank Members who are supporting the Bill and pay tribute to Senator Higgins again. It is a great Bill and it will improve people's lives. I commend the Bill to the House.