Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Thursday, 25 Oct 1984

Vol. 353 No. 3

Progress Report of the Committee on Public Expenditure: Motion (Resumed).

Debate resumed on the following motion:

That Dáil Éireann takes note of the First Annual Progress Report of the Committee on Public Expenditure.

— (Deputy Keating.)

Mr. O'Kennedy

I was saying that we see an impact of £3.8 million that we should not have had to contribute. We should ensure that we have reliable blackboard economic information of a kind acceptable to the EC Commission. Our statistics on macro-economic information are not of such quality as to be so acceptable. Central Statistics take a great hammering these days and while we are placing such reliance in the Government's plan on GNP information it is a matter of grave concern that we should not drop the data information that other EC members give. To date, as far as we know the system could have cost Irish taxpayers millions of pounds less; it would have been £18 million less in 1981. Surely we should have been able to cope with that.

It is important that capital development programmes will not vary or be terminated on a change of administration. For instance, if in 1979 we needed major prison reform we need it even more now. We have reduced public expenditure as a result of that political decision, and needed prison reforms were not carried out. The same principle should apply in regard to general decentralisation. A sum of £7.8 million was allocated to erect safer prisons but that has now all been wasted. I referred to An Bord Telecom. I cannot hear Deputy Gay Mitchell. He is not a member of this committee. Money allocated to a programme of telephone kiosk development was cancelled, although the old system was producing thousands of dud coins.

Mr. G. Mitchell

I have been listening to political twaddle here all day.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I will be waiting for Deputy Mitchell to enlighten me but I hope his contribution will be better than his interruptions. I was referring to the Department of Posts and Telegraphs in 1981-82, particularly in relation to public telephone kiosks. Total lack of responsibility was displayed. At that time the gross cost of telephone kiosk development would have been £5.7 million. The allocation was £4.4 million, a cut of £1.3 million. In 1982 the allocation should have been £7.6 million but in the event it was £5.7 million, a shortfall of £1.9 million. The reason in each case was that the necessary cheques were not there because of the reallocation of departmental personnel. I had hoped that that kind of action would not have been tolerated by any efficient public servants. I join with the chairman in thanking the public service for the help they gave us. I would express the hope that whoever is in Government the Minister for Finance will be responsible to the committee.

Mr. G. Mitchell

There are other speakers who want to contribute. When a report of this kind comes before the House there should be some standard procedure, and given the way the committee has been developing we should have an order excluding front bench spokesmen from hogging these debates. The chairman and the vice-chairman are not doing a great service to the committee by restricting backbenchers from debating the reports.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I do not know what the Deputy means by that. There has been no question of anybody hogging the committee.

Mr. G. Mitchell

I am disappointed with the progress made by the committee. In his introduction the chairman said that the work of the committee was to review and assess virtually all the moneys spent. That is not the work of the committee. It is the work of the Committee of Public Accounts. This committee have failed to come to terms with their own terms of reference.

Mr. Dukes

Hear hear.

Mr. G. Mitchell

They are supposed to be looking at programmes of expenditure and looking at expenditure so that they can report to the House before the expenditure is made. Instead of doing that they are duplicating sections of the work of the Committee of Public Accounts. That is none of their business. They are doing what their report criticises the Civil Service and Government for doing: duplicating, overlapping and thereby wasting public money. When the Committee of Public Accounts comes to look at the expenditure of the Houses of the Oireachtas this committee should be the subject of a report by them for wasting public expenditure.

Mr. Keating

They are obviously doing a good job.

Mr. G. Mitchell

There is nothing in the report which indicates that the committee are doing the job they are supposed to do. They have been meeting but have not made any progress. It is a disgrace to call this a progress report. This committee have the potential to be the best committee of the House. If they were doing their job they would make recommendations to encourage the Dáil to become involved in public expenditure before that expenditure is made.

I recognise that the committee have a small number of staff. However, relative to other committees — take the Committee of Public Accounts, for example, which has the half use of a secretary — a staff of three is significant. I share Deputy O'Kennedy's comments regarding the back-up facilities for Members of the House and the development of committees in the House.

I disagree with the abolition of the National Board for Science and Technology and its merger with the IIRS. That board could have had its terms of reference extended to service committees. We need to develop along the lines of the West German committee system without the fear of undermining Ministers but in a way which would strengthen Parliament and help it to hold the executive and the public service responsible. The Committee of Public Expenditure have a significant role to play in this regard and I hope they will soon pursue the role they should be pursuing.

It is appropriate that the concept of a committee of public expenditure cum a committee of public accounts should be extended to all local authorities. The Committee of Public Expenditure might consider encouraging local authorities, VECs and health boards to have their own public expenditure committees to examine expenditure in detail before it is made so that members are not presented with estimates over which they have no control.

I do not know how the comments made by the Committee of Public Expenditure in relation to the Comptroller and Auditor General came about. He has an unusual and significant constitutional position. He is an officer of the Dáil rather than the Government and he is obliged to report to the Dáil on his findings, which he does regularly. The Dáil sends that report back to the Committee of Public Accounts and they go through that report with him and the accounting officer of each Department, who is usually the secretary of the Department. That is the function of the Comptroller and Auditor General. He has no other function. I do not understand the constant invasion by this committee into the work of other committees. If the committee want to do that, I propose that both committees be merged rather than wasting public expenditure. At present they are duplicating and overlapping and wasting money. At the same time they are telling everyone else to stop doing that. I should like to go through the report in detail but I understand other Deputies wish to contribute.

Mr. Coveney

I am grateful to Deputy Mitchell for cutting his contribution short. I shall try to do the same. Our chairman went to a lot of trouble to clarify his lines with the Committee of Public Accounts and he satisfied our committee that he had done so. The Committee of Public Accounts is an historical one. It deals with things which have happened in the past. It is impossible for us in our committee to accept our terms of reference without looking back as well as forward. Perhaps that is a weakness in the terms of reference but that linkage is there. Our chairman is very conscious of that.

The work of the committee could easily be described as some kind of a witch-hunt against the Civil Service but it should not be so described. Sometimes we are so concerned to get the message across that that is not what we are at, we forget that it cannot be a bed of roses for the Civil Service at times, given our terms of reference. Our terms of reference are so probing that no civil servant can feel completely happy at times about the nature of some of our inquiries. We sent a circular to all Departments emphasising that the purpose of the inquiry was not to find fault. We should not give such an undertaking because if we find something we are critical of we should find fault. Civil servants know and accept that. I am concerned that such statements might blunt the work of the committee. The Civil Service is made up of mature and able people. Civil servants know that the purpose of the committee is to find fault, not in a personal but in a constructive way. I should not like the message to go out that we are so apologetic about hurting the feelings of civil servants that we are not prepared to say we find fault when we do.

There has to be a constructive tension and constructive conflict between this committee and Departments if we are to make progress. At the end of the day we are talking about a country which is grossly and severely overtaxed. We must look at value for money in our public expenditure. That is what we are about.

This time next year this House will be entitled to ask us for an audit on what we have done. The House could ask if we had achieved in our work and with the employment of consultants identifiable savings in public expenditure. That is the bottom line. Our chairman has, very expertly, set out a five-year programme of work going through every Department and semi-State body within our remit. If at the end of five years we have mountains of reports but have not identified areas where savings can be made in every Department we will have failed. We must have an annual audit of our work showing reasonably anticipated savings which would have been agreed with individual Departments. We should take stock of that before embarking on an intensive five-year programme. There are many other individual issues that I should like to comment on but I shall refrain from doing so.

Minister for Finance (Mr. Dukes)

I am a firm believer in the scrutiny of the executive by the legislature contrary to what Deputy O'Kennedy said here a short while ago. He made some scandalous allegations that are totally without foundation. I intend referring to those now though my remarks will have to be rather brief because we are running out of time. I should like to preface my remarks by reading from the terms of reference of the committee. They are:

To review the justification for and effectiveness of ongoing expenditure of Government Departments and Offices and of State-sponsored bodies not included in the schedule to the order establishing the Joint Committee on commercial State-sponsored bodies in such areas as it may select and to report thereon to the House recommending cost effective alternatives and/or the elimination of wasteful or obsolete programmes, where desirable.

Perhaps those terms are not as specific as they might be but they are specific enough to show that some of the items raised by Deputy O'Kennedy are not within the terms of reference of the committee. I wish to make it very clear, and I do not think Deputy O'Kennedy is under any illusion about this, that if there is any matter which he or any other Member of the House wishes to raise with me, any other matter that does not come within the terms of reference of the committee, they have ample opportunity to do so. They have never found me wanting in regard to giving them replies. Has Deputy O'Kennedy ever found me wanting in giving replies to matters raised by him?

Mr. O'Kennedy

I do not know what the Minister is talking about. It will be two months before questions to him arise.

Mr. Dukes

If the Committee on Public Expenditure are not the forum at which to raise these matters, Deputy O'Kennedy who has been in the House for much longer than I have been, must know that there are other channels through which such matters can be raised.

Mr. O'Kennedy

Which other channels?

Mr. Dukes

It is not my function to tell Deputy O'Kennedy his business. He is the Opposition spokesman on Finance and if he cannot find another way of raising these matters within the House, I hardly think it is fair of him to expect me to give him that advice.

Mr. O'Kennedy

Does the Minister mean raising the matters in Government time?

Mr. Dukes

By reason of the terms of reference, the committee are given an important job to do but there are a couple of matters they should bear in mind in regard to the work of the committee. In his remarks Deputy O'Kennedy gives the impression that until the committee were set up nothing was being done about either the qualitative aspects or the control of public expenditure.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I did not say that.

Mr. Dukes

It is my job as Minister for Finance and it is the job of my Department——

Mr. O'Kennedy

On a point of order, the Minister's interpretation is not correct. He must not put words into my mouth.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Deputy O'Kennedy will please resume his seat.

Mr. Dukes

Deputy O'Kennedy may be provoked into interrupting me again but it is not my intention to give way.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I have never said what the Minister is accusing me of saying.

Mr. Dukes

There is built in to our executive system the means by which we control and examine the quality of public expenditure. It is sad that Deputy O'Kennedy does not know a great deal about that but that may be because not much attention was paid to such matters in the administration in which he served.

Mr. O'Kennedy

On a point of order, the Minister has said that there is built in to the executive system the means by which we control and examine public expenditure. Therefore, it is not the executive system that we are talking of today.

Mr. Dukes

That is not a point of order it is a matter of discussion.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Will Deputy O'Kennedy please resume his seat and allow the Minister to continue?

Mr. O'Kennedy

I am speaking about the legislative system. Nothing was built into that until the committee came into being. If the Minister had a little more experience he might be able to distinguish one from the other but as of now he is not able to distinguish between the executive and the legislative.

Mr. Dukes

It is as important a part of my function as Minister for Finance as it is as important a part of the function of my Department to ensure that we have both qualative and quantative control of public expenditure. I am proud of the progress made in the past two years despite the moaning and the howling from the other side of the House. It would make a cat laugh to hear what Deputy O'Kennedy was saying today about the work of the committee.

Mr. O'Kennedy

Is the Minister suggesting that his Department represent this House?

Mr. Dukes

It is well for us to remember those remarks and to recall also the remarks he made not so many months ago when we talked about the criteria that should be applied to public capital expenditure. At that time Deputy O'Kennedy seemed to consider it anathema to think of any degree of control or any degree of qualitative examination or of any concept of getting value for money from the public capital programme.

Mr. O'Kennedy

This is another example of the comtemptible misrepresentation of which this Minister is capable.

Mr. Dukes

The committee like this House, like every Department of State and every other part of our administration, must operate within a number of constraints on the resources at their disposal. I find it extraordinary that the vice-chairman of a committee who are supposed to be devising ways of getting more value from public expenditure is proposing that we increase the total amount of resources for that committee.

Mr. O'Kennedy

Another example of the petty little mind of the Minister.

Mr. Dukes

Without going further, it seems to me that the committee should isolate a number of areas and concentrate on those because they will not be able to do everything. The committee could do a good job for this House by applying their resources effectively.

Mr. O'Kennedy

Is the Minister saying that the committee be directed by him, that they operate on his terms?

Mr. Dukes

I am not saying that.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I would resent any such attitude on the part of the Minister, who is he to tell us what to do?

Mr. Dukes

I do not know whether Deputy O'Kennedy has noticed that the committee have set out a schedule of work for the coming four years. I am only saying that in some regards the schedule may be too ambitious and that a more concentrated approach by the committee would give to this House a better service in that there would be better dialogue between the House and the general public.

Mr. O'Kennedy

Can the Minister explain about the borrowing programme which is costing millions of pounds of taxpayers' money.

Mr. Dukes

If the Deputy would stop interrupting me, I could find time to deal with that. Last March the committee raised the question of balance of payments statistics.

Mr. O'Kennedy

What about borrowing? The Minister must have an answer.

Mr. Dukes

When Deputy O'Kennedy raised at the committee the question of the balance of payments statistics I told him that these figures do not and cannot come within the remit of the committee. That matter was properly and adequately dealt with in this House at the instigation of Members of the House. Again, the question of borrowing is one that does not come within the remit of the committee.

Mr. O'Kennedy

I disagree.

Mr. Dukes

I have no difficulty in discussing the elements of this with the Deputy but I am not prepared to go along with his misuse of the committee to win for himself some cheap publicity even if this seems to be to my advantage.

Mr. O'Kennedy

The entire committee take the view I am taking.

Question put and agreed to.