Ms Gina McIntyre:

No, it would not be that we would be stopped in that regard. We rely on the goodwill of our staff to be very flexible, and they are. They take on extra challenges and they are closing those programmes, which have now stopped being current, and are dealing with the roll out of this one. If we had more staff, we could do it better and faster. We could be rolling out all of our calls, but we cannot. We are staggering them and we are using a lot of external support, through the help of our sponsor departments. We are having to engage contractors to do work. That is not sustainable in the long run because we are losing corporate knowledge there and we are relying on people who we have to have oversight of. The biggest challenge is that, yes, we could have done things faster. We want to make sure the programme is delivered as best as possible but we are curtailed in how much we can actually do in a day and what our priorities are.

The risk, I suppose, is potential loss of funding at a future date if we do not get the programme rolled out as quickly as we can. If we do not get people helping the projects that are funded to spend quickly and deal with problems as quickly as they can - because we have spend targets every year - and the money is not spent at a certain time, we lose it. That could be our biggest challenge in the years to come, but at the moment we are all doing what we can to make sure the money is getting out there.