Mr. Alan Murphy:

There are two parts to the business, so to speak, that were difficult to quantify when they were distributed across 66 bodies: first, the number of calls and contacts that students made with the individual authorities; and second, the scale of the documentation. The Department really was only able to quantify staff, plus a nominal overhead. What we have seen since we set up this authority is that there is a much larger demand for call contact with our call centre. That scenario simply was not foreseen, and basically accounts for the forecasting error on our part at the outset. That was a driver of calls.

Since we opened, and since we started to manage the system, in the first year, as the Deputy said, the documents represented a very heavy cost, because we collected documents for everything. We have minimised that now by only requiring, on average, two documents per student. The cost of document management has decreased dramatically within the overall cost of outsourcing.