Mr. Robert Watt:

That is set out. There is the issue of senior positions in the Civil Service, where we now have fixed contracts. As a result of the changes introduced in November 2011, we do not provide added years or early pension without actuarial reduction. As a result of that, severance payments are made. Then there is the old scheme which included severance payments. Those payments were put in place because we did not want people to stay in jobs for 15 or 20 years. They were given fixed contracts. If there is somebody who has a permanent job at a certain level and one wants them to go for the top job, it was felt back then that in order for them to take a job with a seven-year contract or a fixed contract, there had to be some benefits at the end and some severance payments. This is not unusual. It is certainly not unusual in the private sector but it is very rare in the public sector, where we use it, but it is sometimes a feature of what is required to attract people to do jobs. There is a variety of different reasons why the formal schemes are there and a variety of different schemes are set out. Then there are the discretionary payments which arise when the relationship has broken down, when we have somebody in a position who is not contributing or a relationship has broken down with the board of an organisation, with the president of an institution or maybe with the Minister and where it is seen - by all concerned - that the best way to address the problem is to provide an exit payment. There are two alternatives. One is to work through which was probably pursued before it reached the point where a payment was made and a resolution found. The other is to go through the formal disciplinary process of trying to remove somebody which, as the Deputy would know, whether it is the public or private sector, is very difficult and time consuming and can be unsuccessful and problematic at the end. Where the relationship involving a senior person has broken down, going through that process can be very damaging for the organisation involved so pragmatic decisions have to be made. The number of these payments is small and one could argue that, given the scale of our system, it should be higher. One could look at this in a different way and say that perhaps we are not addressing this appropriately and that we should have more recourse to termination payments where exits occur because there are probably an awful lot more problem situations that we do not address in this way which we try to sweep under the carpet. That is the-----