Mr. Paul Bell:

We have outlined this in our written submission. The whole-time equivalent figure for HSE and publicly funded employment, for all grades, as of September 2019, was 119,126. That represents an increase from December 2018 of 1,269. The Deputy will remember that we are still trying to recover from the gap left by the number of workers who left the service under various inducements over ten years ago and who have since retired. He will also notice that there has come to be an even deeper reliance on agency provision.

That demonstrates that those staff are required but they are not in direct employment. For value for money, if we were talking in those terms, a continual fixation with agency work is driving the budget in the wrong direction. There is a commission that must be paid for those staff. There are also the VAT implications. VAT, at 23%, must be paid. Of course, agency staff, like other workers in the health service, are entitled to be treated equally with their full-time colleagues.