Mr. Tom Hayes:

I have heard the Senator speak on occasion and she asked about the local enterprise offices and the changeover in that respect.

I assure the Senator that we have taken them on board in terms of ensuring that we are inculcating an enterprise culture, not just maintaining it, because to be fair to the people involved in the community enterprise boards, they were very strong on the enterprise culture, but we put a huge amount of work into it last year to ensure that it carried right through into the local authorities. I will not go into all the work that went on in terms of the legislation, the development of the framework service level agreement, SLA, with the local authorities, the changeover of the systems, the branding, staffing and finance. A huge amount of work was involved. That is behind us now and we are on a roadmap. For this year there are eight or nine key deliverables, one of which is the local enterprise plans. This week we will work with all 31 heads of local enterprise offices to ensure the business plan for each county will be of the highest standard and that it is strong and will feed into the county plan, because it cannot stand in isolation and must be part of an integrated plan.

We must ensure the culture to which the Senator referred is maintained. Part of the rationale behind the scenes is to ensure the local authority has a key role to play in enterprise. It cannot just stand aside but must work hand in glove with the LEOs. That is our role and we are driving it through our centre of excellence to ensure we have better entrepreneurs, small businesses and employment spread throughout the country.