Mr. John McKeon:

There are two factors. We did not award a contract, we extended it. We extended it for a year and that is the limit of it. The reason we extended it is two-fold. The two issues that informed our consideration were, first, the approximately 600 people who work as employment advisers in Turas Nua and Seetec providing employment support and advice to people. It would have been foolhardy to take that resource capacity out of our system when Brexit was on the horizon and there was talk of approximately 50,000 job losses in a hard Brexit scenario. That is the most important point. Second, we need to do a review of our contracted employment service provision across JobPath, local employment services and JobsPlus to comply with EU procurement rules. We will do that review and we will determine the future of contracted employment services once that review is completed. They are the two main reasons. As I said it would have been premature to take a decision to stop something until we had completed that review.