Mr. Bernard Gloster:

We are right in the middle of a tender completion process. The last time I was in, I was before the Committee of Public Accounts. There were difficulties widely reported and negotiations were stalled. To be fair, the Minister and the Secretary General made a very firm offer for the HSE to be able to go and make a very good offer to the home care providers across the country. Last Friday was the closing date for them to come back with questions on that. They came back with in excess of 80 questions, all of which we have answered. Now they have a small window in which to say whether they propose to sign up into the framework. If they do, there is a standstill period of two weeks but we will backdate it for anyone that takes it on.

We have a difficulty, in very simple terms and no more than the discussion the Secretary General had about staff recruited from abroad, in that our dependency on the provider sector in home support is too high at 62%. I would rather have a higher rate of public provision but that will take time to build. This year we are hoping to get to the 22 million hours targeted. We are hoping to get there. We are certainly short of it at the moment but we are ahead of the number of people we are trying to provide it to. This means we are probably trying to spread the service too thinly in some cases. Hopefully, in the next week or two we will have a firm conclusion. Home care providers have been given a significantly reasonable offer.