Mr. Tony O'Brien:

In the context of this process, it is around full compliance with the service level agreement process, which in this context alone is about the disclosure, through the template process, of the numbers of personnel employed, the roles they perform, who they are and if they are paid at the level of grade VIII or above. That is in the context of transparency between us and the entities we fund under section 39 recognising, as I said, that they are required to have regard to public pay policy. When processes such as those in the Haddington Road agreement arise, we pass on the cuts commensurate with what we expect these agreements to yield in terms of extra hours, etc. However, as they are not formally subject to public pay policy, we are not in the same ballpark as section 38 organisations. That fits into an overall process designed to ensure all section 39 funded entities are providing the right type, volume, scale and quality of services for which we are paying. As I emphasised before, in that regard we are generally satisfied that the two companies the subject of today's discussion are doing exactly this.

I do not envisage our getting into the space we are in with the section 38 organisations. However, we are going through a validation process and where disclosures are made which may suggest to us there are disproportionately high numbers of staff paid at whatever grade levels, this will be the subject of discussion between us and the entities involved. That will not purely be in a pay-compliance space but around the overall metric and nature of the organisation having regard to the fact that many of these organisations are either in the elderly or disability care space. There is a disability service value for money review which has been published by the Department of Health in the past 18 months which forms part of our objectives in the 2014 service plan. Some of the issues Ms Kerins raised about consolidation of service providers and back offices and generating better value which my colleague, Mr. Healy, will lead out will be informed by what we see in these disclosures.