Last February, the Government published the National Development Plan 2018-2027, a €116bn programme of capital projects to be implemented over the next decade. Sceptics about the scale and content of the plan were few but they would have been reassured by persisting to page 100 with the following: “All project and programme proposals will be subject to the detailed requirements of the public spending code. This includes robust and rigorous project appraisal in order to obtain funding under the National Development Plan. No change is proposed to long-established arrangements for oversight, monitoring and management of voted Exchequer resources. Exchequer funding will continue to be managed through the normal, robust systems for control of voted funds.”

Two of the flagship projects for early implementation were the National Broadband Plan, meant to cost €500m and the National Children’s Hospital, for which the initial budget was €650m. Both projects are now expected to cost as much as treble these figures. Both have been progressed in compliance with the “long-established arrangements for the oversight, monitoring and management of voted Exchequer resources” as proudly proclaimed, and to which “no change is proposed”. Why change these “robust systems of control”?

Oversight

It is now time to abandon whatever long-established arrangements have been relied upon and to acknowledge that the public capital programme, especially where large once-off projects are concerned, is not subjected to effective oversight. The conduct of both the broadband plan and the children’s hospital provide persuasive evidence that the public spending code exists in a parallel universe of apparent common sense, quite unconnected to the dispiriting reality of politicised decision-making, meaningless cost estimates and vast cost overruns.

The public spending code reads well. Projects should be fully costed and none should proceed until a full cost-benefit analysis has been conducted. Sadly, the code does not indicate the procedures to be followed should these injunctions be ignored. Cost-benefit studies have not been made available for the broadband plan or the hospital and they may not exist at all. In neither case were the cost estimates remotely adequate.

Cost estimates

There is still no definitive cost estimate for the broadband plan which has yet to commence the construction phase. Despite the absence of a cost figure, never mind an estimate of benefits, the Government has repeated its blindfold commitment to the scheme. The construction of the hospital is proceeding and expected to cost up to three times the figure for which Government approval was given a few short years ago. No sanctions have been applied to anybody and the political reaction is a kind of synchronised shrug, a weary resignation to a state of affairs to which the Government has become accustomed and with which the taxpaying public is presumed to be content.

On any reasoned assessment the public spending code has not been complied with in either of these cases. They are not the first: there is a long record of major projects coming in well over budget, and of projects proceeding for which no cost-benefit appraisal was ever prepared. In other cases, shoddy and deceitful, pretend, cost-benefit “analyses” have been concocted by project promoters. In just one case, the Bertie Bowl plan to inflict a third, and totally unnecessary, large stadium on the city of Dublin, has an ill-advised major project been averted. Even in this case, the project was halted because of political disagreement in the then Fianna Fáil and Progressive Democrat coalition. It should have been halted because the thumbs-up economic appraisal, prepared by an impressive lineup of Dublin consultancy firms, was a hometown verdict for the project promoters.

It is time to acknowledge that the public spending code is no longer fit for purpose, if indeed it ever was. A system of oversight for public capital projects which continues to enable disasters like the National Children’s Hospital is not working and will not suddenly splutter into life in time to prevent the next one.

There are two immediate actions that need to be taken. The National Broadband Plan should be deferred until the requirements of the code, a definitive cost estimate and a proper, public, cost-benefit analysis, have been furnished to government. There should also be a judge-led sworn enquiry into the debacle of the National Children’s Hospital, for which angry meetings of Oireachtas committees are no substitute.

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