Mr. John Burke:

The Deputy will appreciate that a set of procurement guidelines have been issued by the Office of Government Procurement. All Government Departments and State agencies are aware of it, so it is well documented what the procedures should be. In regard to this particular case, it is clear that there was probably an underestimate of the level of costs in the beginning, in terms of staff costs and the document management piece, which I think was referred to as a forecast error. The issue was compounded by the fact that there was a significant increase in the number of student applications. That is just the harsh reality of what actually happened. I take comfort from the fact that there has been a significant improvement. There is a piece of work that local authorities did that they no longer have to do, and that is outside of the costings here. We are trying to get a handle on the matter ourselves within DPER.

Lessons have been learned. The report compiled by the Centre for Effective Services is very useful. It is an acknowledgement that this is part of the political world. There came a point at which my Department had to give sanction to increase costs, because it simply had to. We had to acknowledge the fact that there were errors by both Departments in terms of what the appropriate cost should be. We had to react to that situation. It does mean that there is a level of flexibility required in these situations.