Richard Boyd Barrett: Advocates 50% Quality Weighting in Tenders

Thanks to Deputy Gibney for bringing forward this important bill, and to Shanna Dorr, Alice Mary Higgins, for instigating this bill originally. I'm very happy to support the objectives of this bill and what it's trying to do, which, as was just said, is very straightforward. That price shouldn't be the only consideration when awarding state contracts, and that, to me, is a no-brainer, not least because I'm dealing with major, major problems, as I'm sure others are. We've seen the National Children's Hospital is the big obvious example, but just at a local level, I'm dealing with an apartment complex that was delivered for social housing at the moment, and the tenants in it are telling me that it's going to have to be pulled down. They want out. They've been in it a year, and they want out, and that's just dreadful. After waiting for, you know, a decade or more to get their social home, and the place is rotten with mould, rotten with damp, there's water ingress coming into the car park, in the vicinity of electrics. You know, it's just, it's a mess, right? It's a mess, and people are only in there a year after all these things. Now, you know, that shows you why quality is important. Somebody can just bid on price, but if they're cowboys, if they're cutting corners, I have certainly heard anecdotally and seen some evidence, indeed, in social housing provision of specs being lowered. In fact, I think in that instance I'm talking about, and it needs to be investigated how this has happened, right, in that particular, but I think originally the builder was planning to build it for the private sector, and I think then when it was contracted by an AHB to deliver social housing, they cut the specs. I think that's what actually happened, personally. That's just a speculation, but, you know, so the question of quality and ensuring quality, and I think the bill is proposing that it should be 50%, is that right? You're saying a 50% quality price for large project ratio in terms of quality. And often, of course, the people who might bid low on price, and you get a higher thing where the quality, you know, is more, where quality features more, but it might be a higher price. Well, often, the one with the higher quality may often end up being cheaper in the end, because we know that sometimes it's the cowboys who do the race to the bottom sort of low bidding, low ball bidding, in order to get the contract, and then it ends up costing a lot more. And they have the state over a barrel, because they got the contract, and the state feels we're in too deep to kind of say anything, and then we can ratchet up the prices. So, the potential, and I was just reading an article as well about the watchdog, I don't know if this was mentioned, the CCPC, Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, talking about cartels that are rigging their bids for state projects now. So, the cartels are working together, they mention areas like construction, but not just construction, working together to see how they can, you know, bid up the price, or, you know, coordinate to get the best price off the state for these contracts. So, I think this is eminently sensible, when we're going out, contracting out, procuring things, to have these considerations much higher up the agenda. I would add a few more. Breed Smith produced a bill in the last, all I think it was, which said that there should be no competition on wages and conditions of employment when it comes to tendering for state contracts. In other words, you know, you know, just take an example of public transport, right, and go-ahead, right? Wages and conditions are significantly less favourable for workers in go-ahead who are providing public transport services. That's why they also find it more difficult to get drivers, and that's why their buses are more unreliable, because they haven't got enough drivers, because they pay them poorly. Dublin Bus isn't much better, but it's a little bit better, in terms of its treatment of bus workers and mechanics and so on. So, this impacts, ultimately, on the quality of the bus service, because it's, you know, price competition or whatever determining. So, it then impacts on the quality of the public service, but the treatment, what they're competing on, essentially, is a race to the bottom in terms of the treatment of the employees, which is very, very stressful, consequently, for the workers. They're under pressure, there's this press-it box system, where there's people on radio saying, oh, you have to slow down, oh, you have to speed up, because of, you know, traffic congestion, which is completely out of their control in any event. But all to meet certain criteria, but workers, essentially, undermining, privatisation, undermining the wages and conditions of workers. So, anyway, I just have to support the bill. But I do just want to say, before all of that, I also think there should also be a consideration, whenever the state is considering outsourcing, whether it would be better doing something directly itself. I mentioned something topical today, which is, essentially, as Kevin Reynolds, I think, from RTE was on this morning, on Good Morning Ireland, saying about how workers are now voting no confidence in the management of RTE, although they said, really, pointing through that to government policy, saying that, essentially, the ability of RTE to produce public service broadcasting is being dismantled. And I think they're absolutely right, by the way, and it's all going to be outsourced to independent, private companies to do the job of public service broadcasting. And, of course, that will be, you know, Kevin Reynolds was making the case, and I think he's right, that private sector, private companies, they won't want to make a lot of the public service broadcasting programs that we'd actually need, because, you know, they wouldn't consider it profitable or important or the legal risks and the resources necessary to make them. Just, they wouldn't have, even if they wanted to, so stuff that we need our public service broadcaster to do, just will not happen, and we are dismantling, under the guise of reforming RTE, actually dismantling the public service broadcaster. And the workers are very angry about that, and I think they're absolutely right, and I've tried to highlight the consequences that can have in areas like the film industry, where conditions, you know, we pump huge amounts of money into the hands of film producer companies. And the employment rights and conditions of workers are not fully vindicated, even though there's large amounts of public money going out, right? So I think we need to be considered, and those are just some examples, should we be doing this ourselves, doing it directly, rather than going out in the first place? And would we have more control over the process? Could we guarantee quality? Could we guarantee the rights, paying conditions of employees? All these sort of considerations, rather than just the default being to go out increasingly, increasingly to outsource, to outsource these things? And, you know, I will say, would I call it an ideological point, to say that the privatisation of a lot of things that used to be done by the public sector is a sort of, you know, an ongoing agenda that we've seen over the last 20 or 30 years, where things that used to be done by the public sector are increasingly outsourced to private companies with, you know, very questionable benefits or, I would say, in many cases, serious sort of adverse consequences at all sorts of levels for workers, for paying conditions of workers, but also in terms of, but also in terms of even things like tax revenue. I mean, I think of, I remember when I was out supporting the pickets of Greyhound workers, who were the bin workers in the privatised bin company, which used to be done by Dublin City Council, they pointed out that at the time, at the time, at least, Greyhound, the private company they were working for, that they felt the need to go out and strike against because of the poor treatment they were suffering, was tax resident in a tax haven, right? And shouldn't that be maybe a criteria we might look at as well, is that we're giving contracts to companies that aren't paying tax here, aren't, you know, are actually actively trying to avoid paying tax, but huge amounts of public money is going into their pockets. And actually, a lot, you know, an awful lot of the private sector, which go on about entrepreneurial ability and all the rest of it, is actually entirely dependent on state money. You know, it's kind of ironic, you often have this counterposition of the private sector versus the public sector, but in truth, huge amounts of the private sector are completely dependent on money they get from the public sector, so we should at least demand quality and proper treatment of workers.