Mr. Barry O'Brien:

The challenge for us in the HSE, both for the statutory and all of the funded agencies, is to maximise everything which we can under the Haddington Road agreement. As the director general, DG, has said, there are some fixed savings which are completely predictable - how much it will save over the year for the pay cut over €65,000, how much it will save by the adjustment downwards in the rate of overtime being paid, how much it will save by the absolute freeze on increments and how much it will save by the delayed payment of increments. The real variable comes in the main in the totality of how one manages the additional hours. If one takes, for example, that Government approved the recruitment outside of the employment ceiling of 1,000 graduate nurses and the recruitment of 1,000 support staff, those are additional to our existing cohort. We currently employ approximately 99,930 staff. We did not meet our employment control framework, ECF, target this year; we fell short by approximately 1,000. Therefore, there was a balance to be struck between delivering safe services and maintaining services and how we manage the employment ceiling.

Deputy Regina Doherty asked if we would be making staff redundant. There is an absolute guarantee that there will be no compulsory redundancies under the Haddington Road agreement on the proviso that staff give complete flexibility. However, if one takes it, for example, that under the Haddington Road agreement there are approximate 5 million additional hours in the system, how will we manage that? One needs to challenge the managers by asking they have done with their hours, whether they have redeployed and reassigned staff, changed rotas or come up with new ways of working. I suppose one is asking the managers, before they even contemplate having any service reduction, whether they have maximised use of the Haddington Road agreement. We are introducing immediately an assurance group which will introduce a standardised model to measure what is happening in each site as per the quantum of additional hours that was delivered under the Haddington Road agreement. This is not what could be; this is what is signed up to. To emphasise what the DG has stated, we will undertake that exercise. We will work with managers to state in that instances they could have done something else. For example, we had an incentivised career break earlier last year before the Haddington Road agreement was concluded for which we received 2,500 applicants; we were only able to facilitate 326 of those and we are now proposing to reopen that scheme. Therefore, one could have an orderly facilitation of staff who wish to take an incentivised career break where one then achieves pay savings by replacing those staff with staff on additional hours and replacing the direct skill set. All I am saying is that is the challenge now facing us and that is why there are no certainties until we get in there to see what is happening and maximise the enablers.