Rose Conway-Walsh: Procurement Capacity Crisis Threatens Security

Thanks for those questions. I just want to ask you a couple of questions, if you like. You referred there to the internal expertise. I take that it's internal expertise you have within your own department. Just across the other departments, is there any other departments that have sufficient internal expertise as well? Yeah, so one of the challenges we see, we talk about this a lot, you know, I mentioned the 8,000 contracting authorities and the schools. Once you get outside, realistically, about the top 100 spending departments, all of those generally have very experienced procurement teams. They come from a procurement background. Some of them would be very specialised in their fields. So, for example, you'd have IT procurement specialists, you'd have communications specific specialists. In defence, certainly there would be defence, for example, specialists or health specialists in the procurement teams, who are very knowledgeable. Once you get outside that, really, you're talking about the next layer is kind of generalists. So, in other words, they've bought something somewhere and they understand the process. And then after that, you're into a whole heap of what we classify as novices. So, in other words, they're in a department or contracting authority that they might do a bit of accounting today, a bit of communications in the afternoon, and they do a bit of procurement a few times a year. And that's where often OGP will step in because, you know, they might be buying, generally, maybe consulting services or, you know, whatever, stationery or whatever it is, energy. And then suddenly they're asked as part of the strategy, oh, we need a new IT system. You know, you take, let's take the Art Council as an example, and I'm not saying they're inexperienced buyers because I can't talk for their procurement people, but, you know, suddenly they're asked to buy this new commissioning system. It's like, well, where do I, I wouldn't even know where to do that. What are we doing to address that? Because, I mean, you referred to schools there and we ended up in the situation where contracts were given to people where it was very obvious when you looked at their accounts, you know, that there wasn't a stability there that needed, so it would seem the due diligence absolutely was not carried out, and the repercussions of that were far and wide and reached into so many communities. So what are we doing to address it? So in the CPB function of the OGP, we have set up what we're calling professional practice, and currently they're developing a program to outline what are the skills that are necessary for public procurement practitioners to have, and then the long-term plan is sort of medium to long-term plan is to work to pull together a curriculum, if you like, around that training program, but then we would hope something like the IPA would deliver that, so that what we can try and do is at least get the practitioners to a certain standard. Other than that, the only thing the OGP can do then is we provide obviously all the guidance and supports, we have a help desk, we do some bespoke competitions, but that they're the kind of the things that are available. Yeah, I don't think that's nearly efficient enough, and you know the IPA and all of that, you have to ground in the long term, but are we not bringing in the external expertise and employing them permanently within the departments to ensure that that's there, and even now if you look in terms of the area of IT and tech and there's every, with the changes in tech and AI and all that, there's going to be expertise that is going to be made redundant from those, so are we recruiting, are we active in identifying who we need from that pool of people that may become available to us as well? I mean I can't speak for specific departments, but I mean generally where procurement is a key function, they will hire people who have that expertise, and I will stress getting public procurement expertise is quite difficult, but to be honest if you're in a department where you need a person who's going to do a piece of accounting and a piece of comms, it's not going to be a procurement specialist, it's going to be an all-round generalist. Yeah, that really does not instill any confidence, and I mean it speaks to your point Dr Davis that we have contracted out everything, and that leaves us so vulnerable, not only from bad actors, but in terms of not building up the capacity that we need, that really gives you value for money in the medium and the long term, like how are we steering the ship around, you know, how are we going to stop, you know, you'll have read the big con, you know, it's not only in Ireland obviously, this is happening, and it particularly happened after the financial crash where the urgency was to, you know, get rid of people, have very lean governments, and now we're so lean, we don't have this expertise that leaves us extremely vulnerable, like I don't know how you would manage all of the external personnel that you're bringing in when you have so many, you know, rogue actors as well, and you know, it just, it all speaks to our defence and to our national security, because if you're talking about defence even, you know, defence isn't just defence in itself, defence is in our utilities, you know, what secures our water, for instance, you know, where are we buying those components for, where are we bringing in, so just tell me that there's some urgency within government in terms of how we are turning the ship around in relation to the expertise we need in procurement. Well, I mean, I suppose departments will hire expertise based on whatever that role is, if there's, if procurement is only a quarter of the role, I don't know whether they will hire that expertise, I mean, OGP would not have a role in that, certainly we'll have a role in terms of building just some standardisation around skills and pulling together in terms of training, but we don't have a role in determining with each department what their needs are in terms of procurement, because that's something they need to determine for themselves, certainly when you look at those big organisations, Irish Water, ESB, I mean, I'm ex-Irish Water myself, they absolutely have very experienced procurement people who know exactly what it is that they're doing, but if you're in a small contracting authority, you may not necessarily have that expertise and that's where OGP will support, but the OGP can only support so much, like we've got 240 staff, of those there's about, my number is there's about 150 or so that are in the sourcing division, so besides doing the frameworks, there's only so much capacity we have to do other bespoke competitions, it's something we would love to do more of, something we also often talked about was would there be a possibility of bringing either apprenticeships in or bringing people in on a rotation whereby before you actually worked in public procurement in the system that you spent a year in OGP, for example, and then you were farmed out almost like a consultancy if you like, where you'd have a bench of people, but that can be difficult to manage, we see that the OGCIO are doing something along those lines at the moment, they bring in about 40 or 50 apprenticeships and they teach them IT skills and then any department that's looking for an IT person, they send them out, we're not doing that yet, we have discussed it, but then there's a huge change of mandate that would need to take place for us to be able to do that, it's not currently in our mandate, so there's kind of a couple of things I suppose from an OGP perspective we're a little bit frustrated about, is that side of it, is making sure those skills are available and two is just that whole, it was mentioned here today, oversight and governance, we don't have any mandate for that and we often see that contracting authorities basically end up correcting their own homework, so it is, let's just say we have our frustrations as well. Yeah, I think it's just important to say that the level of competence and skill required will depend on the nature of complexity and the value, the risk associated with the procurement project itself, so as Dr Davis said, the skills required to procure a pen and pencil are not the same as that to require, to procure a new ship for the defence forces for example, so the competency framework that Ms Stewart mentioned will go a long way to determining what level of competence is required depending on the type of procurement that is being bought, so it's also, I suppose it's important to note that it isn't uncommon across Europe that we do have to bring in specialist expertise when it comes to goods and services, generally we're used to using the open and restricted procedures, which is obviously the open procedure isn't in the defence directive, so where we do go outside of those, sometimes we do have to bring in, especially when it comes to innovation, external experts, also procurement... Where is the innovation within government? Where is the innovation within departments? I just can't see it, so maybe it's happening that, but I can't see it, and surely, you know, we're all for innovation and we have to, I suppose one of the things that we're forced now as a state to do is to have our own innovation, we relied on FDI and external ones, but surely we need to start with government and having the innovation within government, and it's the ability to be able to make the decision of what we want in the first place, what we want to buy in the first place, why we want to buy it, what purpose will it serve now, 10, 15 years' time, what are we meeting, because we see so many contracts and it's so obvious when you see the contracts, and many of them are kept concealed, and I have a big problem with this, because there is a lack of transparency there, because for commercial reasons, they're kept concealed, but you know that the result of the contract, whether that be that it has gone way, way, way overspend or not, that the contract in the first place wasn't the right contract to be signed, who signed that contract, who stands over this is, I made the decision here, it's very hard to see who's accountable. Yeah, and I have to say, we see that term commercially sensitive quite a lot, and I take issue with it myself simply from the perspective that if a contract has been awarded, it's no longer commercially sensitive, in the sense that all you're putting on the system is the actual amount, you're not putting in the commercial pricing methodology of the contract. So one of the things we are doing to enforce more transparency around those contract award notices is, in the next couple of weeks, we've just done a huge development on the e-tenders platform, where we've done this kind of once entry principle, so in other words, once the tender goes up, the information from the tender gets automatically repopulated into the CAN notice, and what that does is that it forces the contracting authority, when they finish the contract, to just put in the value and the awarded supplier. And does that apply to defence as well? No, defence is slightly different because of the secrecy around those, they don't have the same rules, they can, if they feel it is a matter of national security, they don't have to disclose, but for everyone else, we're putting more enforcement in. Right, but is e-tenders, the e-tenders website used for procurement in defence? Yes, e-tenders is used, and it's one of those, so they do use e-tenders platform, absolutely, I think for certain sensitive information, they just do the notice only, and they don't put any further information up there. I had a really good conversation with them, probably a year and a half or so ago now, on that particular point, because one of the things they do, and rightly so, is they track who's opening those tenders, and they do see certain countries where it would raise some suspicion, so I guess that feeds into their intelligence, so as a result of that, there's certain things they don't put up in the system, which is fine. Is there a dedicated category manager within defence? Well, I know Fiona Lafferty is the head of defence procurement, she's a fantastic lady, we do a lot of work with her, she's built up her team actually over the last number of years through support with the OGP, to reinforce the skill set there, and I know she has an expanded team, I think she certainly could do with a few more people, but she certainly has a few additional resources in there, they've also put in a new system in terms of tracking their projects, and as I mentioned earlier, they've set up their high level public procurement group as well, so we do quite a bit of interaction, we have quite a bit of action, to be honest, with all departments, because we have, within my division, I have a service delivery team, and what they basically do, they're like the bridge between the departments and the agencies and OGP, so we provide support, we work with them on their category plans, to understand what's coming down the chain, we try and get a forecast from them of any bespoke competitions they might need, so that we can feed that into John's team, and so we work with all of the contracting authorities on an ongoing basis, we just unfortunately can't tell them what to do, but they'll often ask us for advice, and we happily give it, because as I say, we have a lot of that expertise in-house. But in terms of procurement for each department, the sec gen is in charge, I suppose that's where the book stops. Ultimately, yes, yeah, ultimately they're the accounting officer and they're ultimately responsible, so obviously we'll develop the circulars, we'll develop the guidance, but what we are doing an awful lot more is, certainly in the last three years, we've done a huge amount of work in terms of opening up the kimono, in a sense that OGP was always quite closed in terms of, we'd write things in isolation, we would send them out, we're doing huge amounts of engagement now, both directly with the departments themselves, with the agencies, with academia, even with the citizen, when we developed the strategy, we had citizens that came to those sessions, and what we've also done is we've included suppliers in a lot of the engagement as well, so all the new developments that we're doing on the eTenders platform, and the additional pieces of functionality that we're adding on through APIs, have been developed in conjunction with both our public service stakeholders, but also our suppliers, we've actually a design group with SMEs and other suppliers, because we know they use and interact with the systems as well, so what we're essentially trying to do, because as you know in the programme for government, it was to review the procurement process and make it more efficient, and the challenge we always have is, the procurement process is two parts, there's the legal regime, which we have to operate under, and we find ways of doing that,