Mr. William Beausang:

As the Secretary General has said, evaluation is really important to us. It is important to say that we have had two major pieces of work done, one by Indecon and LE Europe and the other by the OECD, looking at the overall delivery of our skills system. The OECD report was published in May 2023 and the Indecon-LE Europe report was published in May 2021. These looked at the totality of the spend but the NTF is an important part of that. As the Secretary General said, the issue is really getting a methodology that captures the outcomes of investment in the NTF at a higher or meta level. We have talked about the expenditure ceiling. The NTF funding is going out with significant Exchequer funding and delivering our skills system. We do not want to find ourselves looking at only part of the expenditure, just the NTF spend. There is important work to be done with the ESRI to develop a methodology that gives us a means of demonstrating what our skills system is delivering in our discussions with our colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform and with the committee in the context of our accountability to the committee, the Minister and the Government. I will make the point that we have a lot of intelligence from the OECD review and the work of Indecon-LE Europe that tells us how we are doing and where we have to do better.