Seanad debates

Friday, 26 March 2021

Quality in Public Procurement (Contract Preparation and Award Criteria) Bill 2021: Second Stage

 

10:30 am

Photo of Lynn RuaneLynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for attending.

I am delighted to formally second the reading of the Bill.I pay tribute to Senator Higgins for her hard work in this area both in this term and the previous one. This is a complex area of public law. It involves much jargon, legalistic language and terminology that are often not instantly accessible. It may not be instantly clear to persons reading the Bill what practical effect the percentage changing of certain price and quality criteria in a public procurement contract or tendering process might have on their day-to-day life. However, in many ways this Bill could be one of the most consequential that we will debate in this Seanad in terms of actually causing policy and culture shifts that improve the quality of people's lived experiences for the better.

Public procurement is everywhere. Where the State does not or cannot step in to directly fulfil a need or provide a service, an intermediary must be sourced. As we engage that intermediary to fill this space on the State's behalf, we have a responsibility to ensure that service is delivered in accordance with the exact same quality, equality and human rights principles and in the furtherance of the common good that rightly underpins and guides how our public service bodies deliver services and perform their functions.

No one in Ireland should ever be disadvantaged by a public decision to outsource a service or to purchase a product from the private sector. It is in pursuit of this important goal that the real importance and need for this Bill are clear because unfortunately ordinary citizens are required to pay the price for failings in public procurement and also due to a culture that allows the quality of the service to matter little compared with one that can be delivered at the lowest cost.

People have paid through their contribution to public moneys, following supplementary financial claims made after unrealistically lowball initial bids have ballooned to hundreds of millions of euro. They have also paid by having lower quality services and products that have not been delivered at a standard that reflects our ambition or even our baseline domestic and international human rights commitments.

Every Senator will have countless examples of when they have seen public procurement go wrong, when issues that were not aired at initial tendering and contract drafting stages went on to cause serious systematic problems later in the process. If a contract does not need to compete on quality, then we all pay the price. The obvious example is the national children's hospital, where decisions on how to tender for its construction have now resulted in its likely being one of the most expensive hospitals ever built.

The most heartbreaking is the scandal of CervicalCheck which arose from a price-only contract. The most personal for me was my daughter attending a school built by Western Building Systems and being sent home in 2008 because there were concerns about the structural integrity of the physical building in which she was educated and which we were informed might collapse. This is what happens when we get public procurement wrong; public money is wasted, public health is jeopardised and public confidence suffers. We need this Bill to restore public confidence.

This Bill will create a new default approach to public procurement that would ensure that price and quality receive equal attention in deciding between bids for public contracts. Furthermore, for those once in a generation large capital projects when we will not get a second chance to get it right, it is fair and reasonable to expect that at least half of the decision-making on procurement would be determined by quality. Public procurement cannot and should not be just 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.

The Bill would require that the responsibility of public bodies to exercise and promote human rights under the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act would be further reflected in the contracts that such bodies signed for the delivery of goods and services to people in Ireland. When the State spends €12 billion a year on procurement and has such a dominant role in many economic markets, the embedding of human rights and promoting that approach in service delivery really has the potential to revolutionise these sectors and ensure that the State, its bodies and the services it contracts are leading by example.

The Bill is expertly drafted and is considered balanced and timely. I ask all colleagues to support its passage through Second Stage. If they have issues, we can deal with those by debate and amendment on Committee Stage. That is what we have all been elected to do. I urge the House to send a strong signal today that it rejects the sometimes catastrophic mistakes of past procurement failures. We must say to people watching that there will never be a repeat of what happened with CervicalCheck and the national children's hospital, and that the Oireachtas is acting to place the well-being and quality of life of people living in Ireland at the centre of all future public contracts.

I wish to address the amendment the Government has tabled, which would delay the Bill's passage for 12 months.While I accept that legislative change takes time to debate and consider, particularly in between the formal debates that occur in these Houses, I struggle to see what justification the Government has for a further delay of 12 months when we already have engaged in a process that is now several years old. I will end there because I am out of time but I confirm that we will look to address the delay in amendments later on.

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