I move:
That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to require each Minister of the Government, with responsibility for a Department of State, to periodically prepare a capital supply service and purpose report to provide certain information on the assets that were allocated money from the vote for such Department in a relevant financial year and to provide for related matters.
The Bill provides that each Government Minister shall report annually on large capital expenditure in his or her Department five years after the expenditure has occurred. I thank my Regional Group colleagues for supporting me in developing this Bill.
This year, we as a people will spend €13 billion on publicly funded capital projects. It is projected that we will spend €165 billion by the end of this decade. This is a substantial accomplishment by our society. It is as a result of all the discipline and pain of the austerity years and all the hard work in crafting a strong economy from the nadir of the 1950s.
We all hope our society continues to invest wisely in ever better services and resources for our citizens. As a nouveau riche country, we have massive infrastructural deficits that have built up over generations. As we unwind that inheritance, funding better railways and roundabouts, play parks and ports, schools and sewers, quays and other things beginning with "q", the people and the backbenchers representing them will need better visibility on where this public money goes. It is a curious feature of our parliamentary budgetary process, remarked on by the OECD and others, that rather large sums of Exchequer funding that are earmarked through Departments are never seen or heard of again in this House. It is remarkable that the Dáil is never supplied with a list of approved or completed projects. The Where Your Money Goes website, in all its multicoloured glory, breaks things down only to the nearest billion. Parliamentary questions on capital spending need to be consistently addressed and answered if we are to assemble any sense of the overall pattern.
We need this simple and robust Bill to tease out, in a gentle way, consistent and appropriately granular historical details in order that, over time, we can achieve a clear picture of public spending. The Bill closes the loop between approval and reporting. At the moment, the only formal oversight of expenditure is when the Comptroller and Auditor General or a committee of the House finds something exceptional. We parse the venial or the calamitous but miss the broad issue of overall priorities and patterns. I am reliably informed and advised that reporting five years after completion will steer well clear of any competitive sensitivities that might blunt the State's ability to negotiate. The Bill also provides a mechanism to allow a Minister to delay reporting should that need arise. I am also reliably advised that recent advances in the Government's ICT system make this form of reporting relatively straightforward.
The Bill, in a gentle way, will strengthen our democracy. If passed, it certainly will strengthen the ability of the House to discharge its duty of oversight of expenditure. This becomes a slightly more pressing matter as we contemplate a larger Dáil and a fixed number of Cabinet seats. We will need measures to rebalance the powers between our Executive and our Legislature. The simple act of seeing where the money goes will improve the quality of our debate on how best to spend public money. It will support transparency in our politics and policymaking and make for more informed policy. It will strengthen tax cohesion as people can see where tax income goes.
I am very grateful for the support and advice from staff in the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers, who supported the crafting of this modest Bill. I am thankful to the Parliamentary Budget Office for its supply of information when requested. The very act of reporting back to this House on where capital voted expenditure goes five years after capital funds were approved and spent, with all the appropriate protections and caveats, will make us a better, even if only a slightly better, Republic. I commend the Bill to the Dáil and I hope it receives wide support.
