Ms Kim Hayes:

The grade of staff we are considering in this conversion are front-line social work, social care, family support and administrative staff who are supporting social work and front-line teams. The majority of the administrative staff we have in an agency are supporting front-line staff. The aim would be to provide them with temporary contracts, as Mr. Gloster said, to create workforce stability in the existing services. We discussed this with Forsa and it was quite positive about it. It will not affect any permanent appointments. We will still continue to fill permanent appointments from our permanent panel. We have preparatory plans in place and we suspect, as soon as we get the go-ahead, we can realise this in eight to ten weeks.