New Leinster House bicycle shed cost €335,000 due to 'sensitive location'

mathepac said:
I was expecting something, anything, for all my money. And yours too.
Click to expand...
What's really depressing is that this sort of thing isn't surprising.

From their website:
The Office of Public Works (OPW) is a government office that delivers public services for flood protection, managing government properties and heritage services.
The OPW, as the leading agency for flood risk management in Ireland, minimises the impacts of flooding through sustainable planning. A core part of its remit is maintaining and presenting Ireland’s most iconic heritage properties, including Ireland’s two World Heritage Sites, 780 National Monuments and over 2,000 acres of gardens and parklands. It also manages a significant part of the State’s property portfolio and provides accommodation for government departments, over 700 Garda Properties and approximately 550 offices.
The OPW was established in 1831, predating the foundation of the State. Its headquarters are in Trim, Co Meath.

2,500 or so employees and a budget of over a half a billion, all that "other people's money". Just imagine how much they waste on other stuff!
 
From my experience in the Civil Service (doing a small amount of procurement work) it's probably a Principal Officer who would have signed off on this contract - so it should be relatively easy to pinpoint whoever authorized the final invoice. The major problem with all of these kinds of things is the fact that Civil Servants are mostly "generalists" and haven't a clue what things should cost in the open market. They are simply required to get three quotes and go with the cheapest - all other things being equal. Suppliers know this and play the game accordingly...

I believe there are quite a few Civil Servants (former and current) on this forum and I'm sure most would confirm that the file on a bicycle shelter would be very small beer in the scheme of things. Anyone who has ever worked on PQs, Ministerial Representations and FOIs would have been well used to clearing these facts in a day or two.

I'd expect the so-called "review" to be available within a week or so....
 
Howth Head said:
The major problem with all of these kinds of things is the fact that Civil Servants are mostly "generalists" and haven't a clue what things should cost in the open market. They are simply required to get three quotes and go with the cheapest - all other things being equal. Suppliers know this and play the game accordingly...
Click to expand...
That's frankly ridiculous, anyone involved in entry level procurement should have a business degree, procurement experience preferably in multinational land and a procurement qualification.....

this is not rocket science, years ago I worked very briefly in procurement, I treated every purchase as if it was my own money....why? Because that's what the rest of the guys in that dept did, they were cattle dealers with degrees who took pride in getting the best bang for buck for the business

How are we in 2024 with this level of civil service shoulder shrugging incompetence in such a critical area? Aren't there oversight committess that should have tackled and corrected this 3 decades ago?

What class of donkey thinks 330k for a bike shed is small change and the money involved doesn't raise some class of jolly Roger flag?
 
Last edited:
You don’t need a degree to do procurement. Nobody who buys stuff where I work had a degree in “how to buy stuff” and we spent millions each year buying stuff from all over the world. You certainly don’t need one to buy a bicycle shelter.

You just need to know how to use Google.
Even if you’ve never bought anything in your life you should be able to ask yourself “should a bicycle shelter cost as much as a small house?” and get the answer right.
 
Howth Head said:
From my experience in the Civil Service (doing a small amount of procurement work) it's probably a Principal Officer who would have signed off on this contract - so it should be relatively easy to pinpoint whoever authorized the final invoice. The major problem with all of these kinds of things is the fact that Civil Servants are mostly "generalists" and haven't a clue what things should cost in the open market. They are simply required to get three quotes and go with the cheapest - all other things being equal. Suppliers know this and play the game accordingly...

I believe there are quite a few Civil Servants (former and current) on this forum and I'm sure most would confirm that the file on a bicycle shelter would be very small beer in the scheme of things. Anyone who has ever worked on PQs, Ministerial Representations and FOIs would have been well used to clearing these facts in a day or two.

I'd expect the so-called "review" to be available within a week or so....
Click to expand...
The procurement rules in the civil service are very comprehensive and offer little room for manoeuvre. It doesn’t take any market knowledge to follow them properly.

The question to be answered here is whether the procurement rules were followed and, if not, why not.
 
Purple said:
You don’t need a degree to do procurement. Nobody who buys stuff where I work had a degree in “how to buy stuff” and we spent millions each year buying stuff from all over the world. You certainly don’t need one to buy a bicycle shelter.

You just need to know how to use Google.
Even if you’ve never bought anything in your life you should be able to ask yourself “should a bicycle shelter cost as much as a small house?” and get the answer right.
Click to expand...
Will agree to differ on that.

Where I worked most recently (Pharma US multinational) you couldn't get an entry level supply chain or procurement job or come to think of it any significant job without a basic degree related to the discipline.

Most had masters and maybe 30-40% had PHD level qualifications.

A few years ago I saw a entry level job at another company I used to work for looking for an MBA (bit ott to be honest).

Best industry practice needs to be followed or else you end up with this insanity. Dread to think what has been flushed down the pan on the Childrens hospital. Can only imagine the supplier salivation when an RFQ was sent out.
 
Salvadore said:
The procurement rules in the civil service are very comprehensive and offer little room for manoeuvre. It doesn’t take any market knowledge to follow them properly.

The question to be answered here is whether the procurement rules were followed and, if not, why not.
Click to expand...
This should also be an opportunity to take a step back and look at those procurement rules to see if they are fit for purpose, or are being too restrictive \ prescriptive and ruling out cost effective options. Is the lack of market knowledge costing millions of euros.
 
I don’t think the procurement rules are the problem. I think it will emerge that the job started off as a minor works project that didn’t warrant tendering and morphed into something else completely. The question is why.
 
I spend a lot of my time looking at Public Procurement deals. The quality varies from body to body. Some bodies are excellent, many have brought in people with good tech industry experience in CTO/CIO roles for example. Some leave a lot to be desired. Some are bringing in the likes of E&Y to manage their procurement process and I know of at least one who anonymise the tender responses prior to internal review so no-one marking it knows who is tendering in an effort to reduce bias (although if you have experience, you can probably give a good guess anyway)

What is clear, post the Children's hospital fiasco, is a desire to move risk onto the supplier with an very strict "fixed price" approach as change requests are a dirty phrase in the Public Sector, as is Time and Materials. Hence suppliers are having to add a risk premium to their pricing which drives up the cost.

I saw a Galway firm said they could build a bike shelter for 16k. If that was the price for building one on a private company site, I'd expect them to add 20-25% to cover the risk for a Public sector site. But it is still a long way short of 330k.

I do think there is more to this then meets the eye and the contractor did other work for the 330k as well.
 
The answers to this whole saga could be obtained in 1 afternoon with a meeting of about 6 people internally. But they want the steam to blow out of this and the public to forget about it and months from now, a report that cost 50k (cobbled together by a few juniors in an accountancy firm) will tell us nothing.
'Lessons will be learned' and assurances around 'best practices' in the future is all you'll hear then
 
howth head said
"They are simply required to get three quotes and go with the cheapest - all other things being equal"
so what was the other quotes ? 400,000 ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top