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Departmental Expenditure

Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 13 November 2012

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Questions (316)

Pádraig MacLochlainn

Question:

316. Deputy Pádraig Mac Lochlainn asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the cost of establishing the Ireland Stat website; the number of staff allocated to its running and their salaries; the annual cost of running this website; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [49403/12]

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Written answers

Ireland Stat is a new initiative to provide simple and clear information about how Ireland is performing by reference to well-specified indicators across the broad range of governmental activity. It is part of the Government’s modernisation of presenting information on how public money is spent, allocated and accounted for and is a natural development of the Performance Budgeting initiative that was rolled out to almost all Departments at the start of this year and published in the Estimates document in February. These initiatives set expenditure in the context of Departments’ strategic goals, as set out in their Statements of Strategy, and present performance information, both in terms of actions and impacts, alongside the financial and human resources information that was already included in the Estimates. Both the Performance Budgeting initiative and Ireland Stat meet the Programme for Government commitment for greater accountability and transparency and build performance information into the heart of the budgetary process.

Furthermore, these initiatives represent a considerable streamlining of information and reporting of what Government Departments and Agencies are doing and achieving with public money. In particular, Performance Budgeting replaces the requirement to produce Annual Output Statements, a process that involved a degree of administrative burden on Departments and Offices as they had to reshape how information was presented in the Estimates to match the structure of their Statements of Strategy. There is now a single, coherent way of presenting the complex array of information that relates to each specific policy programme.

As I have already noted, the development of Ireland Stat is very much part of my Department’s ongoing work on the Performance Budgeting initiative and I am pleased to inform the Deputy that the Ireland Stat initiative was in the main developed using the skills and knowledge of the officials in my Department. The technical aspects of the Ireland Stat development were managed in-house using internal Systems Development expertise. There are no staff allocated whole-time to running Ireland Stat: a small team from the Central Expenditure Evaluation Unit, part of the newly established Irish Government Economic & Evaluation Service, were involved in the selection of the indicators and the overall website structure, as one element of their broader work programme, in close liaison with colleagues working on the overall programme of public sector reform. Their work has been informed by international best practice in this area. External consultancy services were retained for the specialist website design and the supporting graphics, for a total cost of just under €5,100.

As Ireland Stat is at a pilot phase there is a public consultation under way and details regarding this consultation are available from the Ireland Stat website. Following a complete review of the pilot project a decision will be made as to whether or not Ireland Stat should be extended to encompass all strategic programmes. Should the decision be taken to extend the project across all programmes, then the work required to develop and sustain the website will be streamlined within the existing work of Departments.

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