Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The budget reflects the pace of migration to shared services. Sometimes it does not progress quickly and we must slow the pace. We are consolidating a range of services while continuing to provide them across the public service. The incremental budget in 2015 reflects the migration of payroll services to the centre. Some €5 million of the increase is mirrored in the budget reductions in the originating Vote. As it migrates into a shared service, there is a saving in the parent Vote, with further budget transfers to be achieved and the migration of all payroll, for example.

Client Departments paid €2.5 million for the PeoplePoint service in 2014. It is intended that this charge will increase to the point where the cost of the service is fully recouped from each Department. Departments will be required to absorb this cost within their existing resources. This is something that they have achieved to date. The 2014 underspend that the Deputy pointed out was driven by a later than anticipated decision on the financial management shared service project, which in turn impacted on expenditure on licensing costs, combined with a later phasing of waves to the other shared services.

The provision in this Vote necessarily includes a one-off set of costs that will taper off once the various services become operational. The committee will see evidence of this in programme B3 on PeoplePoint and programme C3 on payroll shared services centres, PSSCs, where projects are processing at the set-up stage. Regarding external services and consultancies, the Estimate includes a provision of €7.5 million this year spread across current and capital budgets. This reflects the procurement of essential IT and project expertise across the three projects, namely, human resources, payroll and financial management transactional services. The number of staff also increased from 596 to 649, reflecting the redeployment of payroll staff from originating Departments.

To be blunt, we did not progress in 2014 as quickly as we would have liked, so we did not use the Estimate. Obviously, we will not use the money until we are ready to make the transactional change. We are confident that we will expend it all and have the consolidated shared services in place during the course of 2015. The completion of the second shared service round will happen at the end of next year, not this year. We must make a decision on the financial management shared service.