Mr. John McKeon:

The current status of the contract is that we are extending it for a further year to the end of 2021. It was due to expire at the end of this year. We had intended to run a new procurement this year and would probably have changed the design of the scheme a bit. There were two reasons for running the new procurement. It is one of the issues the Comptroller and Auditor General referenced in his statement of internal financial control.

The procurement on our community-based services does not comply with EU procurement rules, unfortunately, so we need to come up with a new procurement model that will enable us to keep the local employment services. In doing that we would change our post procurement of the JobPath capacity as well. In terms of the approach, we would still have a payment- by-results element to it. Whether we would have the current model of payment by results as strongly is up for question. We commissioned a report by the Institute for Employment Studies to advise us on this matter and we recently received the report and referred it to the labour market advisory council. It is suggesting that we still keep the performance-based element, but perhaps rebalance it a little. There are risks in that. The performance-based element works for the Exchequer because one only pays for results, whereas when one changes the payment rate so that it is more for the service rather than the results, one has a fixed cost and a smaller variable cost. We will be examining that over the next couple of months.