Mr. Peter Tyndall:

It is difficult, is it not? I was aware that the members of the committee were very unhappy about people having to administer a scheme with the characteristics we have been discussing. The most diplomatic way of putting it is that I was not surprised to hear that they had resigned. The Deputy's assumption is that as no measures were put in place, these people were not leaving because their term of office was over. It is probably best to ask them directly, but my sense is that they were being asked to do a job and they were fully aware of how deficient the criteria they were being asked to implement were. I think they, like the Deputy, would have found it frustrating at having to turn down people who clearly needed to access the scheme but who were not entitled to do so because of the narrowly drawn nature of the criteria. The Deputy can draw his own conclusions as to why they resigned.

The criteria are clearly nonsensical. They have almost a 19th century feel to them. It is a very old-fashioned way of going about determining whether a person needs access to transport. When the court properly found that they were not consistent with the legislation, rather than changing the criteria, the Government changed the legislation. It is time now to change the criteria, and to change them urgently. There were to sets of reasons for delays. The first one, of course, was that when the decision of the court was made, it was no longer possible for the board to continue to make decisions because the criteria had been deemed to be inconsistent with the legislation. There was a period during which no decisions were made until the legislation was changed. Then, of course, we have the situation now that not long after the legislation was changed, the members of the board stepped down. The delays just add to the frustration.