Sinn Féin spokesperson on Further and Higher Education, Mairéad Farrell TD, has today launched her Transparency and Social Value in Public Procurement (2024) Bill, which would improve the functioning of the public procurement system via two avenues.

Teachta Farrell said:

“Firstly, this bill would create greater transparency, oversight, and accountability in procurement spending.

“Secondly, this bill would allow the procurement system to be better used as a tool for supporting industrial policy purposes, that uses spending to better achieve social, environmental, and other objectives.

“It would do this by requiring contracting authorities to prepare and submit annual reports to the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform with certain prescribed data.

“The information in the report would include:
the type of procurement procedure used,

the performance of the contractor,

details on cost over runs,

information on non-compliant expenditure,

the use and type of social clauses in contracts (labour activation, creation of apprenticeships, environmental concerns, etc),

and details on contracts awarded to small and medium size enterprises.

“This data would then be linked to other relevant public registries (CRO, eTenders, Courts Service, Register of Beneficial Ownership of Trusts, Examiner of the High Court) to improve the interoperability of the system.

“So, if a public body wanted to examine who the contractors that had bid for a project, they could see on the CRO what contracts they had previously been awarded, whether these contracts came in on time, on cost, and how the public body scored their performance.

‘This would serve two purposes: It would highlight good performance by contractors acknowledging them for good work done, and it would flag consistently deficient performance which would serve as a warning to a public body about a particular contractor.”