Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 21 April 2021
102. Deputy Richard Bruton asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the key performance indicators his Department uses to establish the extent of green public procurement; the level of achievement they show for the most recent year for which data is available; and the improvements compared to three years earlier. [20336/21]
View answerIn 2019, my Department published Circular 20/2019: Promoting the use of Environmental and Social Considerations in Public Procurement. The Circular instructs Departments to consider including green criteria in public procurement processes where:
- Clearly defined, quantifiable, verifiable, and measurable criteria have been developed by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC), and are relevant to the specific procurement process, and
- The cost can be met within a Department’s existing budget, without impacting on service delivery
Defined, quantifiable, verifiable, and measurable criteria for a number of products and services have been developed by the Environmental Protection Agency and are available in Green Procurement - Guidance for the Public Sector, which can be downloaded from gov.ie. These criteria are being updated by the EPA and new criteria, for a broader range of areas, will be published in Q2 2021.
Circular 20/2019 also requires public bodies to incorporate relevant green procurement measures into their planning and reporting cycles. The following Green Public Procurement reporting requirements apply to all Departments:
a. Each Department and contracting authority should state how it intends to incorporate green considerations in its Corporate Procurement Plan
b. Starting with the 2020 Annual Report, each Department must report annually on progress in relation to Green Public Procurement
c. Queries related to the development of the templates and guidance can be sent to the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications.
As set out above, the Annual Report template with an accompanying guidance note was to be made available in 2020 by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was subsequently tasked by DECC to produce a Reporting and Monitoring template for Green Public Procurement. Departments were requested to return their reports for 2020 by the end of March 2021. The EPA is now assessing the returns for 2020.
Compared to three years earlier, considerable progress has been made in the area of green public procurement in Ireland. In March 2019, the Social Considerations Advisory Group was established. This group aims to promote and facilitate the incorporation of social considerations, including environmental considerations, into public procurement projects. It brings together officials from policy departments with public procurement practitioners to share best practice in relevant fields. To update objectives of the group in line with Programme for Government commitments, new Terms of Reference were developed in September 2020, and the group has been renamed as the Strategic Procurement Advisory Group (SPAG). This year, the OGP and DECC jointly established an Environmental subgroup of the SPAG. This subgroup facilitates more detailed, technical, discussion of approaches to incorporate environmental considerations into procurement. Membership includes the EPA and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, as well as representation from procurement bodies. To assist policy makers and practitioners in understanding how public procurement can be used to facilitate the advancement of wider public policy issues, in December 2018 the OGP published an Information Note on Incorporating Social Considerations (including environmental considerations) into Public Procurement. More recently, the OGP also assisted the EPA in developing training in the area of GPP for procurement practitioners. The EPA is funding the provision of this course, which is being run several times through 2021.
