A review by consultants Deloitte into the controversial Dáil bike shelter has found “the absence of some fundamental good practices” in the Office of Public Works (OPW) which led to the spending of €335,000 on the structure, which was the subject of political uproar last year.
While the audit found that some of the practices in the Public Spending Code were followed by the OPW, it reports that there was no “value-for-money assessment” carried out.
“Our internal audit review has identified the absence of some fundamental good practices in how certain elective capital works (including the bike shelter) ... are being initiated, approved, managed and delivered,” the report finds.
“The most fundamental of these control gaps is the absence of a value-for-money assessment which would have allowed informed OPW personnel to evaluate the cost-benefit of building a covered bicycle shelter in the requested location within the Leinster House campus.”
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The revelation that the bike shelter had cost €335,000 led to huge political controversy last year. Politicians disavowed responsibility for the high costs, pointing the finger instead at the OPW, which asked the consultants to conduct an audit of the project. The report is expected to be published shortly.
While the report acknowledges that OPW personnel were “primarily focused” on delivering on requests from the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, “the reasons for the costs associated with the Bike Shelter project should have been documented in a value-for-money assessment which should have been performed within the OPW as part of a robust options appraisal process”.
The report also says that reasons for the high costs include “alignment of the Bike Shelter with the fabric of existing structures and maintaining the important city centre space to a high standard”.
However, it adds: “Regards of the reasons, a value-for-money assessment should have been performed and the outcome of this value-for-money assessment (in effect a formal and documented sense check on cost vs benefit) together with lower-cost alternatives, and the option of doing nothing, should then have been presented back to the HOC [the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission] as part of a robust options appraisal. Approval to proceed should only have been formalised when these evaluations were complete.”
The report concludes that the “project management process for elective capital projects less than €500k in value requires review and update”.
