In March 2023, the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan (NDP) Delivery and Reform informed Government of changes to the capital appraisal guidelines as part of package of significant actions aimed at enhancing delivery of the NDP. Among other things, this increased the thresholds for the classification of major projects at which full Public Spending Code (PSC) scrutiny is required and reduced the number of steps for proposals to travel through before approval to proceed.
The updates to the Public Spending Code were implemented after a high-level review among Secretaries General in key capital spending departments was commenced in April 2022 to review the requirements of the Code. The Department of Health was represented on this group. Following a series of meetings, this Secretaries General group set out a series of six key principles and referred these to a practitioner group of experienced public servants from across Government departments. The practitioner group was tasked with considering the principles and returning to the Secretaries General group with recommendations as to how the PSC could operate in a more streamlined manner and take account of the appropriate legal responsibilities of Accounting Officers. The Department of Health was also represented at this Practitioner Group level.
These welcome PSC reforms can have a positive impact on the timeline for major capital projects, including the proposed Emergency Department, Women & Children’s block at University Hospital Galway (UHG), to proceed through the stages of the project lifecycle in a timely and efficient manner. In line with the updates to the PSC, the Strategic Assessment Report (SAR) stage has now been subsumed into a single SAR/Preliminary Business Case (PBC) document.
I am pleased to confirm that the SAR reviews by my Department and the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Review and Reform, for the proposed Emergency Department, Women & Children’s block at UHG, have been completed. Despite the updates to the PSC, since the SAR review for the Galway proposal has already been completed, the output of the reviews has been shared with the HSE to ensure that the new SAR/PBC is as robust as possible.
The HSE has undertaken work in parallel to the SAR to support the expedient development of the PBC and is now considering the implications of the recent PSC changes.
The timeline for the completion of the SAR/PBC cannot yet be estimated as the outputs of the SAR review and PSC changes will have to be incorporated by the HSE.
When the new SAR/PBC is finalised it will be subject to further review and Government consent before it can proceed to the pre-tender stage.
