Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

Clearly, we seek to maximise the expenditure from the estimation we have given and the available funding. We are not happy to have to return amounts of any significance. However, it is very challenging to maximise expenditure in the context of the nature of EGF arrangements as confirmation comes fairly late in the process. We have sought and discussed upfront ways to increase expenditure by reference to the national training fund and the Exchequer contribution. We know that we will never achieve 100% spending because a maximum amount will never be realised. The TalkTalk experience shows that even where we are implementing a programme having learned all the lessons and are getting relatively positive feedback from the workers, there are still workers who do not engage or who have engaged to an extent, but have entered employment and do not want further measures. We know that the spending maximum is not 100%, it is somewhat below that. All other countries are struggling in this regard. While I am not sure if a spending average has been calculated since 2011, we are above the average overall and have only had one programme which was below the European average.

The question of awareness is a key one. One of the difficulties we have experienced has related to the initial national blast from the media to say that money is available. There has been some criticism about this. When we started off initially, we did not have the communications systems in place to ensure that people attending FÁS would be made aware of the programme. We accept that. It often happens in our business that there is a media announcement but not everybody on the ground knows about it. It was exacerbated in that case as the initial media announcement took place before we had worked out exactly what we were going to do. We were developing the concepts and ideas as the announcement was happening.

Engaging with workers is harder in sectoral rather than non-sectoral programmes.

The engagement in a company-based one is to get in on the ground with the company with the FÁS co-ordination unit and a consultative group that is recognised by the workers as being representative of them and meeting their needs. Where we do that, we will seek to maximise.

It is worth saying that we deliberately overestimate when we make the initial submission because we want to leave scope for any possibility for any worker whereas when it comes to the actual expenditure, the expenditure has typically been somewhat less even on a per worker basis in respect of those who have assessed. In summary, we are not happy to be returning money. It is not a position we want to be in and we are seeking to maximise the return from TalkTalk and any future ones.