Vol. 510 No. 6
299 Mr. C. Lenihan asked the Minister for the Environment and Local Government if his attention has been drawn to the existence of the United Kingdom's highways agency which assesses the performance of contractors paid to build major road projects; and if he will consider a similar agency here. [23516/99]
The National Roads Authority has since 1994 been assigned overall responsibility for the planning and supervision of works for the construction and maintenance of national roads. In that capacity, it supervises the award of major road contracts by individual road authorities against relevant public procurement criteria including economic advantage to the public sector.
The Operational Programme for Transport (OPT) 1994-99 provides for a technical assistance programme, one of the primary purposes of which is to strengthen monitoring, evaluation and control systems. The programme specifically provides for studies designed to ensure that the optimum value for money is obtained from investments in national roads. The national roads monitoring group, which is chaired by the Department of the Environment and Local Government and contains representatives of the Department of Finance, and the EU Commission as well as the National Roads Authority was set up, inter alia, to assist in the coherent and co-ordinated assimilation of the recommendations of the various studies into the day-to-day planning, design and implementation of the national roads programme. One of the functions of the National Roads Monitoring Group is to monitor and review systems for cost estimation in relation to the national roads programme, with a view to helping ensure that maximum value for money is achieved.
