Quality in Public Procurement (Contract Preparation and Award Criteria) Bill 2021: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2022-05-18 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland I understand that exclusions are very difficult. I have studied procurement law and realise that if one does have an exclusion then one is more likely to be challenged. This is why it is really good to have price quality from the beginning, otherwise when a company with a poor track record offers the lowest price then one must award it the contract unless one goes through a formal exclusion process. However, price quality allows one to reward good practice. It is a lot easier to encourage and reward good practice than to penalise bad practice or a bad record. As the Minister of State has said, one could reward companies that have references and can show they have a track record for delivering on time. One can give that benefit. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2022-05-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2022-05-18