Mr. Ed Hearne:

In our Department, we tend to be pretty focused on the money in light of the nature of our remit. What we really have been trying to do is expand that. As we have been talking about here, there is more of a focus on outputs but it is now much more about trying to bring a focus on outcomes. We are also feeding into the well-being work across Government that is being led by the Department of the Taoiseach. Our contribution to that is focusing on looking at particular discrete policy analyses on different topics. We have started looking at particular work in early child and youth intervention and also in outcomes for the elderly in society. Our contribution to those has been to take it through from the outputs that are set out in the performance report to look more at outcomes. Again, as I said, that will gradually form part of how we build this out.

On the wider question, if we contract public services we need to be able to ensure the provider is concerned with all of the things we would be concerned with if we were delivering it from the public sector. It should be concerned with the outcomes. Sometimes it will be difficult to structure a contract where outcomes or impacts that might be dependent on many extraneous factors are captured. We really should be ensuring at a minimum that we are confident the outputs that make up the contracts can contribute to the outcomes. The breadth of what we are doing here will be another strand in this work.