I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." This Bill comes at a timely moment, as I am sure the Minister of State will agree, when her Department has launched a review of the public procurement system. I hope this review will be constructive, that it is not just a box-ticking exercise and that we look at the nuts and bolts of this issue. How the Government deals with this Bill and the review will be really important. I have worked with a number of Ministers, depending on the Department in question. When I introduce legislation, I have always told them that I am open to working with them. I do not just complain about the issues I see. Rather, I bring forward solutions. I have introduced numerous Bills during my time in the Dáil, some of which have been accepted and others that have not. I am here to work with the Government on these issues. I hope it is willing to work with me. There can be a reflexive attitude whereby the Government is unwilling to agree to things that come from this side of the House solely on the basis that they come from this side of the House. I hope that will not be the case with this Bill. What I have always said is that if the legislation is good, then it is good legislation no matter who introduces it and we should work with it. We are talking about the Transparency and Social Value in Public Procurement Bill 2024. The Minister of State and I discussed procurement yesterday at the finance committee. The Minister of State acknowledged that there were serious deficiencies when it came to data collection on the spending on public procurement. People would be shocked if they realised that we spent €22 billion per year on public procurement and that the State was the biggest spender in the State. We have a responsibility when it comes to how that money is spent, not only in ensuring we spend it wisely, correctly and within budget, but in how it impacts on all of society. We know there is a money multiplier effect. When money is spent within a local economy, it can have an impact on that local economy. We always need to make sure we have that in the back of our minds when we talk about this. We do not have timely data on the number of contracts that ran over cost last year versus the number of contracts that came in on cost. We do not have the total level of cost overruns in big contracts. We have no idea how many of the contracts that concluded last year came in on time versus how many came in behind schedule. We have no idea what the most popular type of procurement procedure was last year, such as how many contracts were awarded directly versus how many went to competitive tender. How many SMEs won contracts? We do not have this information to hand. How many contained social clauses to promote some social labour or environmental objectives? We do not have the data on that. In the last Dáil term, I contacted a range of local authorities and State bodies asking them about their use of social clauses in public contracts. A huge amount of them did not know what I was talking about. Some responded to my survey saying they adhered to the minimum wage. That is the law; it is not a social clause. That just shows how much we are operating in a system where we do not know what is going on. We are operating within a black box system when it comes to public procurement. The situation currently is one of “No data, no problem”. My Bill is not going to revolutionise the procurement system. It would, however, provide a reformist Minister with an important tool of oversight with which significant reforms could be made. The laissez-faire attitude when it comes to public procurement in this State is hopelessly outdated. I drafted the Bill in such a way that a money message should not come into the equation. The information the Bill would like to see as part of the report is already largely being collected by the individual contracting authorities. It is just not being collected centrally in a timely fashion. It is not published, presented or analysed in a strategic way. We are talking about €22 billion. We should be able to know what is happening with that money. There is an analogue approach to public spending in a digital age. While I hear great things from this Government about AI, the digital transformation and so forth, when it comes to a public spend of €22 billion per year, the most up-to-date report we have is from 2019. That was six years ago. I had not even been elected to this House at that stage. It seems nothing has changed since. If the director of a major company asked the chief financial officer, CFO, for information on the number of contracts awarded directly last years versus the number that went to competitive tender and the CFO was unable to tell the director that information and only had data from six years ago, that CFO would not be long in the job. I am not equating the public and private sectors to the same extent. I am just making the point that we do not have that data to be analysed. I understand that the review of the procurement system was probably put in train some time ago, perhaps before Deputy Higgins was a Minister of State, but she is the Minister of State with responsibility for this area now. I hope she is serious about the reform that needs to happen and that we can work together on this Bill. Not only is it timely legislation, but we have a duty in this regard, given of our positions in this House. The Bill is not a party political one. It is a Bill that tries to get a certain amount of work done. I do not know anyone opposed to the concept of having more data on a €22 billion spend, considering the lack of any kind of concept of what exactly is going on. This Bill is compliant with EU directives, so there is no issue there. It follows on from some of the recommendations of the European Commission about using our public procurement system to promote industrial policy purposes. What those purposes are will depend on the Government of the day, but I cannot imagine the Minister of State would disagree that it is better to have such tools at her disposal than to not have them. This Bill would not even involve the Minister of State with responsibility for the Office of Government Procurement, OGP. As the Minister of State rightly mentioned yesterday, the OGP is not a regulatory body. The Bill would involve the Minister using his or her powers to have this report compiled. The Bill also sets limits so that contracts of a small value would not be included. Therefore, it is not creating some unnecessary administrative burden on contracting authorities. If the Government is serious about tackling wasteful public spending and the prudent management of the public finances, it should support this Bill. If the Government is only interested in staying on the old "lessons will be learned" merry-go-round, then it will not support this Bill. In issuing external value for money reports and going about business as usual, I am sure some excuses will be found to oppose it. When I first got elected to the Dáil, I became my party’s spokesperson for public expenditure. The first thing I wanted to do was look at the issue of procurement. I met the OGP and looked into the issue. The first thing that shocked me was that we did not have the information. In the context of better public spending and everything else, this Bill makes sense. It also means that State bodies would have a lot more information as to what worked and did not work. We can always learn from one another. At the moment, we are relying on freedom of information requests or an investigative journalist to uncover large cost overruns or wasteful spending of public money. As the Minister of State with responsibility for this area, I imagine she does not want to be answering questions about issues she was not aware of due to a lack of data and that she only ever became aware of because someone got a tip-off or found out the information some other way. It comes down to how we look at the money we spend for the public and economic good of our citizens across this State. Looking at different parts of this State, I think of areas like Donegal that are infrastructurally far more difficult to get to than others. Conamara is another example of an area with bad infrastructure leading out to it. We are trying to get private capital into these areas to get businesses started in order that there be more and better job opportunities for people. If we are the biggest spender in this State, then we need to look at how we spend that money to employ people and get people on apprenticeships. For example, when I was on Galway City Council, we put forward and passed a social clause in terms of labour activation to include the apprenticeship model. That means for some young fella or girl who has decided that he or she wishes to do an apprenticeship, there is a big capital project. The Government is saying it is big into the infrastructural aspect and wants to invest in that space. No matter who is awarded the contract, a big capital project just up the road from that young person would give him or her that opportunity because of the labour activation element. This would ensure that there are not only the jobs but the apprenticeships. I do not need to labour the point because the benefits of this are quite clear. I do not think there is any reason not to support this Bill. I will listen to what the Minister of State has to say and I will see what comes out of that. Sometimes, we need look at how things can be done differently and more simply and not just think that this is the way we have always done it and not change it.

Sentiment score: 0.11

First, I will mention the survey results. The Minister of State mentioned that she dealt with the Dublin local authorities. I cannot remember - I would not say it in this House anyway - exactly who responded in what way but there was a very clear lack of understanding. I am happy to meet with the Minister of State and share my results in a way that shows her how little information is out there, not in the sense of trying to land blame on any person. That is not what that is about. It is more about the fact that the information is not there. The focus has not been there. That focus does, I think, have to come from the Government. It has to come from the Minister of State, in my view. To be honest, I am quite disappointed that the Minister of State will not be supporting this Bill, or that she is putting a 24-month stay on it. The 24 months in itself baffles me, to be perfectly honest. I have had this done to me on numerous Bills I have had. I have had it done with my protected disclosures Bill and my lobbying Bill, and now I have it with this. To be clear, I do not take Bills lightly. It takes a huge amount of work over several months. I think it took well over a year, maybe a year and a half, to do this particular Bill because when I put a Bill forward I want to do it right. Of course there are going to be issues that will have to be teased out on Committee Stage. That is the nature of it. Unfortunately, as Deputy Nash mentioned earlier, it is probably not the most emotive topic. It is probably not the snazziest topic that really catches people's attention but if people realised the impact €22 billion can have and the way that money is spent, I think it would be quite a snazzy topic for people. What I do not understand is the concept of kicking this down for 24 months at a time when there is a review of the public procurement system going on. That is ridiculous in a sense because what the Minister of State is saying is that in the midst of a review where we have been told it is the time to consider a progressive reform of the system, this Bill is here to do just that. As a result of that, I think it should be considered. The fact that this has now been pushed back for a two-year period, well after the review will have been concluded, I would imagine, does not make sense to me either. If the Minister of State was saying that the review will be concluded in a certain amount of time and we will revisit it then, that would be fine but if the review is going to take two years, how long is it going to take the Minister of State to make the reforms subsequent to that? I have to say I am disappointed. I probably should not be because it is something I have come across before in this Chamber. I was hoping we would look at tangible actions. Even if the Minister of State felt there were certain issues that needed to be teased out, changed or whatever, we could actually look at tangible actions that we could do. I am worried that there does not seem to be the will there. This is about waste of money and how money is spent. It is also about how we can better spend the money. With regard to some of the comments the Minister of State made, the EU Commission is currently engaging in proceedings against Ireland for failing to properly enact the fifth anti-money laundering directive because of the manner in which it was transposed. This relates to the issue of trusts the Minister of State was talking about. The State was also in the spotlight due to the use of trusts for listed financial activities, and this Bill would help to improve that. It is bizarre to hear that this is being used in an area where we have been found wanting. This does not make sense to me. When we talk about beneficial ownership, that is a no-brainer, in that we should know where our money is being spent. We should know who the money is being spent on. I think that is incredibly important, and that is what the whole issue of beneficial ownership comes down to. The concept that we do not know just baffles me completely. If the majority of companies in the CRO, as the Minister of State said, are not using public contracts, it is clear there is no massive creation of work here. If the majority in the CRO are not, it should not be really about creating huge amounts of work, and finding out who we are spending the money on should absolutely be a no-brainer. The Minister of State was also talking about equality budgeting before the committee yesterday and her support for this, and I do not doubt that. On the use of social clauses, I welcome the fact that the Minister of State met with certain Dublin authorities. That is maybe too Dublin-centric in my opinion because we need to look at how our money is being spent across the State to promote both social value and equality. My Bill would help to highlight where that reluctance is because we need to know. If we have the data we can look at where the reluctance is. We are talking about being prudent with public finances. There is talk about AI and digital transformation while at the same time, we are relying on procurement reports from 2019. It is like a Sunday league football team talking about preparation for qualifying for the UEFA Champions League. The words just have little relationship to reality. Even if the Minister of State never intended to allow the Bill to pass the last Stage, if we had the opportunity to talk about and go through this, the Minister of State would have the opportunity to tease out the issues in the midst of her review. By the time these things get to Committee Stage or get through it, it will have taken a huge number of months rather than waiting the 24 months. The Minister of State is telling us that she has to wait for the EU to tell us what is what, while at the same time the EU is telling us that national governments need to improve the functioning of their own procurement systems. That is what this Bill intends to do. What we are saying, however, is that we have to wait for the EU to tell us what to do. It has also been found by the Information Commissioner that once a contract is awarded, the contractor and price are no longer confidential, so there should be no issue with connecting procurement systems to other public registries because the commercial sensitivity has, at that point, gone out the window. The Minister of State also talked about deregulation. We do not even have the data on how the regulations would be applied because there is this black box I was talking about. I do not understand that either. We also had the Draghi Commission, and I know the Minister of State has not spelled it out. Undoubtedly this is part of it but the Draghi Commission was about promoting a new industrial policy. If we are serious about looking at a new industrial policy, there is one arm of the spending in the State that we have control of, and that is spending by the State, which again is the biggest expenditure in the State. We are talking about €22 billion. This is a tool. I have given the Minister of State a tool by which she could use the system for industrial policy purposes but she is saying "not right now". That just does not seem to make any sense to me at all, especially given that we often hear that lessons will be learned. We have often heard, when it comes to an overspend or wasteful spending in the State, that lessons will be learned. Lessons cannot be learned if we do not have the data to look at. We will often hear Ministers come back and say that we never talk about the spending that has come in on time or on budget, and all of those things, but we do not have the data. We need to have the data. In order for anything to work with regard to changing how we do things, we need to have the data. This information would also be of use to the Minister of State specifically in this instance because she would have those data readily available to her. The Minister of State is at the start of her ministerial journey in this Department but she is going to continue. When she has all of that information to hand, she may come across things where she will think, "Do you know what? I want to do X. This is done well in this place, or this is done well in that place". Somebody might come to her with an idea, or she might come across it through her own research or whatever it may be. Then she could say, "Well at least now I have the data so I will be able to look at implementing it because I have the data to hand". I am very disappointed because this has happened to me a few times when I have introduced a Bill. I am trying to work with the Government on this. It is not just about giving out. I will give out when needs be but it is also about working with the Government. I take that aspect of this job very seriously and I make sure I am offering solutions. We have a Bill here. It makes sense to me. I have only been in this House five years but at the very start, it came to me straight away and I thought, “Why in the name of God do we not have that information to hand? Why can we not work collaboratively?”. It makes zero sense to me, to be honest, that this is being pushed down the road for 24 months. I hope the Minister of State does not regret this in future when she does not have the information to hand to make it easier for herself to make changes that need to be made. I am sure she has her ideas about what she wants to change, and things will come up over time, but if she does not have the data to hand it will be far more difficult to implement it. Sin é. Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach agus leis an Aire Stáit. I thank the other speakers.

Sentiment score: 0.12