Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent)
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219. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the budget allocation for the Statute Law Revision Programme for the years 2011 to 2016; the amount of expenditure that will be incurred on the specific task of repealing legal instruments on the statute books since before 1820 and which are now the subject of a public consultation. [36743/14]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The work of the Statute Law Revision Programme to date in removing obsolete legislation from the statute book has been strongly supported by outside observers such as the OECD, and is a key part of the Programme for Government 2011-2016 and the Public Service Reform Plan 2014-2016. The forthcoming pre-1820 Bill will be the single largest repealing measure in the history of either this or any other State and will be an important building block towards an eventually fully-revised Statute Book.

Prior to 2012 the Statute Law Revision Programme was located in the Office of the Attorney General. For this reason my Department had no 2011 or 2012 budget allocation for the programme. The outturn for 2012 was €91,821 which reflected a number of work streams during that year including the enactment of the Statute Law Revision Act 2012 which completed the review of all pre-independence primary legislation.

In 2013 a budget allocation of €138,000 was provided for, with an outturn of  €125,970.75. In July 2013 the Government agreed to pursue several work streams of statute law revision across the Statute Book including in relation to post-1922 Acts, secondary legislation both pre- and post-1922, and charters.

In 2014 a budget allocation of €159,000 was provided for, with an outturn of  €79,784.19 in the year to date. The budget allocation for 2015 and 2016 has not yet been determined and will be dealt with in due course as part of the Estimates process.

The Deputy may wish to note that as regards these budget allocations, the Estimates heading for Statute Law Revision Programme includes payment for the Legal Adviser to the Government Reform Unit who carries out advisory functions in relation to other legislative priorities in the Programme for Government  such as the Freedom of Information Bill, the Public Service Standards Bill, the Protected Disclosure Act and a number of other measures. The budget allocation set out in the following figures therefore does not exclusively relate to statute law revision as such and includes the full range of services of the Legal Adviser.

In relation to the expenditure on the specific tasks associated with the current Bill it should be noted that the pre-1820 Bill is the first in a series dealing with secondary legislation. It is intended that, subject to the passing of this measure, later Bills will deal with later periods of secondary legislation. For this reason, in tandem with the preparation of this Bill, work has continued on a number of other areas. These include the analysis of later secondary instruments, a scoping exercise in relation to a Bill to repeal spent and obsolete primary legislation enacted by the Oireachtas post-1922, and recording charters and letters patent. Because the activity of the Programme has been carried out in a number of parallel work streams a breakdown of the specific cost attributable to the pre-1820 Bill is not available.

Finally, in addition to the figures set out about, some permanent staff of the Department have at various times also been engaged in the programme on a part-time basis.