Mr. John McCarthy:

I am always very conscious that sessions like this can be very helpful in giving perspective back to us on which we obviously need to reflect. I would make three comments in response to that. Some of the bodies the Chairman cited are single bodies. We do a lot of our work through 31 local authorities and one of the things we continually struggle with is the local authority saying, "You are collecting too much information from us and you are harassing us for this, that and the other." We always try to strike a balance.

To come back to the point the Chairman made on the transfer lists and why we have not collected data in respect of that, historically we have viewed that as being a matter to be administered locally. We do not want to add it to data collection we are doing from local authorities.

In terms of the housing list, unlike the number of claimants who are on jobseeker's benefit or something like that, those are the actual people who are in receipt of it. That would be very obvious to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection or any organisation that would be managing that. They would know exactly how many they are paying. We can say through the local authorities and the approved housing bodies how many households are being supported. The difficulty with the list, and the Chairman talked about having figures every week or every month, and the reason we have to do it as a once-a-year exercise is that what we will capture every week and every month is people who are going onto the list. We will capture some who are coming off it by virtue of being allocated but we will not capture people who have come off the list by virtue of their circumstances changing. Otherwise, local authorities would need to be continually engaging with everybody on their lists.