Ms Áine Stapleton:

Let me give the Deputy an update on the Accounting Officer’s response to the report. In relation to the oversight arrangements, the Department engaged the Housing Agency last year to commission a report on the oversight of the HAP and the governance structures as it evolved through the set-up phase into consolidation. That report actually aligned very well with some of the recommendations coming from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s audit.

Under the initial structures, we had both an oversight group and a project board. The recommendations coming through suggested we now needed to consolidate into one strong oversight group. There was a strong recommendation in the report that the oversight group should not be chaired by either the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage or the Department of Social Protection, but that we should bring some independence to the chair. We have now brought in an independent chair in a newly constituted oversight group.

The oversight group is currently working through its work programme and is very much guided in that work programme by the recommendations that have come through from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s audit. Therefore, there is good alignment now between where we have got to on the governance structures and the oversight.

The other piece of advice that came through from the Comptroller and Auditor General, on which we are following through, is that we should liaise with the Department of Social Protection and effectively learn best practice from it regarding the types of additional controls it exercises that we might replicate to support the controls that the Secretary General has referred to.