Ms Ita Mangan:

Quite a large number of questions have been asked and I will try to deal them in the time available.

Deputy O'Dea said that the Department had four staff when it looked after MABS before 2009 and that 74 staff work in the CIB. Yes, something like 74 staff work in the CIB but they also provide an information service, an advocacy service, training, the hearing service for the deaf and all sorts of other services. It is quite ridiculous to compare the two issues.

When the CIB took over MABS in 2009, it had 92 staff but it only has 74 today. I want to kill that one immediately. I do not think it would be a good idea to get more staff to do a compliance job. The CIB does not want simply to be a compliance organisation. We want to be an organisation that encourages the further development of Citizens' Information services and MABS.

In case people get the wrong impression, I would like to point out that I personally was involved in setting up Citizens' Information services in the 1970s. I realise that dates me very considerably but it nevertheless is the case.

I absolutely reject any suggestion that the people on the board of the CIB now have anything other than the best interests of the CIS and MABS at heart.

I will now turn to the question of what happens when the restructuring is over. We expect that the restructuring will take approximately 18 months. We cannot guarantee, and nobody can, that there will never be any further change. Life is not like that. I could not say, with my hand on my heart, that there would be no further change at some future date. It is my hope and expectation that there will be massive improvements after the implementation is fully conducted and that we will have more MABS services and more CIS and they will get into every corner of the State. I hope that everybody with mortgage arrears will be in a position to access MABS. I accept that MABS grew out of a local desire to provide services but the reality now is that all the recent developments in the services offered by MABS came from the top. It was the Government that decided we should have a dedicated mortgage arrears service. It was the Government that decided we should have the Abhaile service. It was the Government that decided we should have the court mentoring service. These are all great developments and I am delighted about them but they came from a national level. They did not come from a local level. The establishment of regional boards will not necessarily remove the local aspect because of the people who work in MABS. With regard to volunteers I should point out that the services MABS provides are delivered by professional staff. There are some 800 board members who give their time voluntarily. Staff that works for MABS will be, as I have said, in the same place, delivering the same service and conscious of all local needs. If the existing MABS companies take up our suggestion that they be local advisory groups, then they will be able to give the local input that is desirable and which would be helpful to the people concerned.

On the issue of costs, I make the point to Senator Higgins that there are no volunteers working in delivering MABS services. There are some 1,000 volunteers working in the CIS. We are in the process of developing a new volunteer strategy. It is our intention to foster further volunteering within the CIS. The change from local boards to regional boards will not change the role of volunteers who work in the CIS in any way. If a new board is established, a volunteer in Bray, for example, will still work as a volunteer in the Bray information service. There is no reason why there should be any change in the volunteering by people in the CIS.

With the boards of MABS, the reality is that some boards actually do the administration themselves and I accept that - Mr. Clarke is one of those people who do that - but most MABS administration is undertaken by the people who work in MABS. This takes away their time that they could be using in their role as qualified money advisers. The dedicated mortgage arrears advisers are qualified to help people with their mortgages. Dedicating their time on returns to the Companies Office and the Revenue Commissioners is not a good use of their time. With the regional structure we hope there will be a common pay system, a common HR system and savings in those areas. This brings me on to the cost-benefit issue. Costs have been examined in some detail in the various reports. We will forward the details of these to the committee because it would take too long to go through them all now. The costs have been examined and we looked at having a county model, a regional model and a national model. The simple reason the county model is not acceptable is that we would end up with 52 companies and we do not believe that a reduction from 93 to 52 is enough to achieve what we want. In fact, eight and eight are probably the outer limits of the manageability of the scheme.

Deputy Martin Kenny asked about the specific complaints about MABS companies. It would be entirely inappropriate for me to mention such complaints, but I assure the Deputy they exist and are being dealt with directly with the companies concerned. The representatives here today are not the employers of MABS staff, they are the representative body of the employers of the MABS staff, so we could not - in all fairness to everybody - bring individual complaints to their attention. It would be entirely inappropriate and is not the way to deal with complaints. We have all had a lot of experience recently in how to properly deal with complaints to properly deal with complaints one of the things we do is to deal with the direct employer, that is the local board in these cases.

I apologise that I cannot remember exactly which member asked about the level of consultation. Consultation has been going on for several years and, as I said in my opening statement, I regret that the decision has taken so long, but that is the way it is. The various consultation mechanisms are outlined in all the reports and again, we can provide the committee with the exact details of that. I chaired the recent restructuring committee myself. Obviously, I was not involved, as chairman, in the earlier discussions about restructuring but I was involved in the recent round. There was no dissent from the decision of the restructuring committee. I absolutely accept that the MABS organisation is not happy with the proposed restructuring, but it is not that we did not consult. We did. We are faced with a situation where, as the group responsible for public money, we must make the decision and we must stand over that decision. I accept that MABS are not happy with the position. It is very obvious, but I do not believe there is anything we can do about that.

There are responses to the extensive consultation that took place in 2014-2015 and we will provide that to the committee afterwards. We will also supply the Comptroller and Auditor General's letters which specify exactly what we are required to do.

Deputy Joan Collins asked about why the Department of Social Protection handed over responsibility to the CIB in 2009. The simple reason is that at the time the Department realised it did not have the mechanisms for proper oversight of the spending of the funding. The Department generally hands money to its own staff to distribute and oversee. The analogy with the community employment service, as referenced earlier, is not exactly on point because community employment services are provided by other organisations that are financed by various Government Departments, which have their own control mechanisms. Some CIS providers have community employment schemes in operation and there is a difference between them. Lots of community employment schemes are run by non-companies. There are all sorts of different employment schemes so I do not think it is comparable to the status of MABS or the CIS.