Ms Oonagh Buckley:

I doubt very much any major sector will produce another couple of hundred allowances. The process undertaken by the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is exactly the process we wanted Departments to do, which is to be thorough about the business cases presented to us. The process required detailed work. There may well be legacy allowances in other sectors that were never payable to new beneficiaries. They never came to be examined under the allowances review because they would never be payable. We have been careful in stating that we were notified of 1,100 allowances and we have been sent more than 800 business cases. We always stated that there may be allowances where, for whatever reason, a Department becomes aware of the payments but has not submitted a business case. It may believe a business case is viable and it can continue to submit business cases. That has been always part of the process.