Mr. Paul Kenny:

When we are amalgamated with the Financial Services Ombudsman, there certainly will be a ground floor for anybody with complaints in that broad spectrum. The Ombudsman for Children is a very special case and needs to be totally separate. The Office of the State Ombudsman has acquired a huge increase in the bodies under jurisdiction under the latest legislation and there may be further expansion in that regard. We are all members of what was formerly the British and Irish Ombudsman Association and is now simply the Ombudsman Association. It is the policy of the Ombudsman Association that, where possible, if public services are devolved into the private sector - that is, where the responsibility for a public service is retained by a public body but contracted out to a private provider - then the ombudsman should retain jurisdiction over that service. In such cases, the ultimate responsibility for providing the service will rest with a local authority or similar, even though the day-to-day provision is done by somebody else in the private sector. In other words, the service remains a public service. There is a case to be made for that approach. The issue arises much more often in the United Kingdom, where the authorities were much quicker to privatise everything in sight than we have been. However, it is happening here more and more often. If there is a possibility that some public utilities might ultimately be sold off, for example, this certainly is a matter that merits consideration.