Michael Colreavy (Sligo-North Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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17. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the percentage of supplies and services public contracts that have been awarded to micro-enterprises which collaborated on a public sector tender through a joint bidding or consortium formation, year-on-year over the past three years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [33409/15]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The national platform for the management of tendering, eTenders, which is managed by the OGP, does not collect data relating to consortia or joint bids as part of the tendering process. Directive 2014/24/EU published by Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) on February 26th 2014 which is yet to be transposed in to Irish Law, instructs that information on whether contracts are awarded to a group of economic operators (joint venture, consortium or other) is to be captured. It is intended that eTenders platform will have the capability to capture this data.

Since late 2013 the OGP has undertaken a significant business intelligence exercise to analyse the national state spend and tendering activities.  As the Deputy is aware, a ground-breaking report was published earlier this year by the OGP which analysed 2013 spend and tendering activity from 64 large public service bodies across thousands of account codes relating to almost 4 million payment transactions.  Over 35,000 suppliers were classified by size using data from Dun & Bradstreet, Irish Times, eTenders, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and SoloCheck.ie.  However for the majority of businesses full data was not available and for the majority of likely "micro" businesses no data at all was publicly available.  Where no classification data was available (accounting for 14% of the spend data collected), these suppliers were excluded from the analysis.

Much effort has been made by the OGP to communicate with Suppliers asking them to update their business profiles in eTenders (the national tendering platform ) with accurate business profile data so it can expand and improve the classification methodology. Until more data is available the OGP will not be able to report specifically on micro-enterprises.

The OGP consistently promotes the inclusion of SMEs in public tendering activities and as part of Circular 10/14 issued last year SMEs are encouraged to consider using consortia where they are not of sufficient scale to tender in their own right.  The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has also issued guidance for companies in this regard.  Template tender and contract documents allow for consortia to tender for public procurement opportunities.

The OGP issued a report titled "Public Service Spend and Tendering Analysis for 2013" and the positive news for Irish businesses and for SMEs is that the data indicates

-93% of public service expenditure is with businesses in the Republic of Ireland;

-66% of public service expenditure is with Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), ranging from high levels of SME success in areas such as Plant Hire (98%), Laboratory and Diagnostic Equipment (87%) and Minor Building and Civils Works (85%) to low levels in areas such as Utilities (24%) and Medical, Surgical and Pharmaceutical Supplies (38%).