Seán Ryan (Dublin North, Labour)
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Question 234: To ask the Minister for Finance the amount of expenditure on consultancy by his Department in 2003, 2004 and 2005; the number of consultants engaged by his Department in those years; and the steps which have been taken to reduce the expenditure on consultancy and the reliance on consultants by his Department in these years and for the future. [41723/06]

Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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In the years 2003 to 2005 my Department entered into contracts for consultancy services with 77 consultants. In the same period my Department spent some €6.57m from its vote on those consultancy services. A significant proportion of this was related to ICT system and software development.

As the Deputy will be aware, my Department issues comprehensive guidelines concerning the engagement of consultants. In the period to which the Deputy refers, the guidelines entitled Engaging Consultants: Guidelines for the Civil Service were in effect. My Department complied with those guidelines.

The guidelines cover a range of topics relevant to the decision to commission external support or assistance. They stress that value-for-money considerations must be paramount when deciding whether or not to engage consultants, that projects should be strictly necessary and that consultants should only be engaged where specialised knowledge is not available internally, or in the wider civil service, or where independent advice is deemed essential, and that as far as possible skills are transferred to the civil servants involved. My Department is distributing revised guidelines on the engagement of consultants to all Departments and Offices.

In addition, the recent establishment of a Central Expenditure Evaluation Unit will provide my Department with internal expertise on programme evaluation and project appraisal. This initiative will allow it to reduce its reliance on consultants for such functions. The Department's Training and Development Strategy (training and post-entry education) supports this by facilitating the participation of staff in the Master of Economic Science in Policy Analysis Programme at the Institute of Public Administration.