Ms Hilary Murphy-Fagan:

First, my office has regular engagement with the unions and meets them regularly. Obviously, as another stakeholder I would always welcome any evidence they might be able to provide regarding how we could improve our service. I said at the outset that this is a very large-scale shared service operation and it is still relatively immature. Second, service is utterly important to us. It is our reputation and we are constantly striving to improve it. We have a very strong governance process. We have a customer services group which has representation from HR managers and finance officers from the various Departments we service. My colleague, Ms Lyons, is on that customer services group and it is chaired by the chief human resources officer for the Civil Service because shared services are part of that HR strategy. The group meets monthly to look at what the top issues are. Service management meetings are held very regularly to examine what issues are arising for staff or management, to understand the root cause of those issues and to see how we can improve those. We keep a log or record of everything. We look at what issues we are able to resolve and close and what issues remain open. It is really quite a robust system around service management. We report on our performance against service targets so it is very transparent. We do not hide anything. It is very transparent for everybody on how we are doing.