Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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64. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if cross-Border procurement has increased; and if so, the amount by which it has increased since the Office of Government Procurement began operating. [13511/15]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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Under EU and national rules, the public procurement of works, supplies and service contracts above certain thresholds must be awarded on the basis of objective and non-restrictive criteria. The aim of these European rules is to promote an open, competitive and non-discriminatory public procurement regime which delivers best value for money. It would be a breach of the rules for a public body to favour or discriminate against particular bidders on grounds of nationality and there are legal remedies which may be used against any public body infringing these rules.

The Office of Government Procurement has been operational since January 2014. Statistical information in relation to above-EU threshold tendering activity by the Irish public sector is collected and provided to the European Commission for each year. These EU statistics for 2013 and 2014 are not yet available and therefore we do not have the data to perform trend analysis on that tendering activity. The OGP plans to issue an annual report on spend and tendering analysis for 2014 similar to that recently published on 2013 data. Content of the report will be subject to data collected.   

The 2013 Spend and Statistics Report mentioned above and issued by the OGP analysed a subset of total procurement spend for government.  The OGP is confident that the data set is representative of public service spend and that the collection and reporting methodology is robust. The procurement expenditure that has been classified and analysed for this report is €2.742 billion across 35,827 suppliers. Of this €2.742 billion 93% went to Supplier accounts in the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and 7% went to Supplier accounts outside the RoI. It must be noted that the data set for 2013 used in this report is not complete and that as more data is collected and analysed, and business profiles for Suppliers are received, the statistics may change.

The reform of public procurement across the public service is on-going and will continue to provide opportunities to the SME sector to win business.  My Department continues to introduce changes to assist SME's in competing for government contracts. In April 2014, I introduced Circular 10/14 which provided guidance to contracting authorities on measures to reduce barriers for SMEs in tendering for public contracts. In addition, the Office of Government Procurement continues to engage with industry bodies through the SME Working Group to identify issues in public procurement and implement solutions.

The public procurement market in the EU is estimated to be valued in excess of €2.4 trillion. It is important to remember that open tendering is a two way street and that it provides Irish companies with opportunities to compete abroad.