Eoghan Murphy (Dublin South East, Fine Gael)
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247. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills in relation to Student Universal Support Ireland student grant administration, the number of service providers that were invited to tender for the contract; the performance criteria set for delivery of the contract by City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee; if City of Dublin VEC will pay any financial penalty for their under performance over the past eight months; if the contract will be offered to other public and private service suppliers for the 2014/15 academic year as part of public sector reform and the date on which the Accenture report on SUSI's performance will be published. [25371/13]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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In January 2011, my Department issued an Expression of Interest invitation to the VECs, local authorities or other public bodies who might be interested in taking on administrative responsibility for the centralised student grants awarding and payments function. A total of 10 proposals were received.

These proposals were examined by an independent selection panel against the evaluation criteria which were an integral part of the Expression of Interest procedure. On the basis of the review carried out by the panel at the initial stage of the process, four proposals were short-listed for oral presentation. Following oral presentation these proposals were assigned a ranking depending on their relative strengths under each of the evaluation criteria leading to the preferred proposal. The selection panel evaluated the proposals under each of the following criteria:

- Organisational capacity to perform the function;

- Experience in dealing with comparable schemes/services;

- Existing core management, expertise and resources available to be deployed to the function;

- Capacity to deliver strong cost and efficiency benefits;

- Overall quality of the proposal for delivery of a central student grants function.

Following this process, the selection panel made a recommendation to the Minister for Education and Skills on the preferred proposal which was the City of Dublin VEC proposal to establish Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) as a unit of that VEC. While indicative delivery costs were provided by each of the bodies, they were not as such tender prices, as this was an expression of interest process. These indicative costs were considered under the evaluation criteria which examined the capacity of the bodies to deliver strong cost and efficiency benefits. Each of the short-listed proposals was marked under all of the evaluation criteria heading.

City of Dublin VEC was designated as the single grant awarding authority and operated on a transitional basis accepting all new applications for the 2012/13 academic year. The independent review of the first year of operation of SUSI was commissioned by City of Dublin VEC and carried out by Accenture. The report was published on Friday 17th May 2013 and is available on www.cdvec.ie.