Mr. Bernard Gloster:

To avoid confusion, there are three components. There is agency staffing, which is temporary staffing. If we look at the profile of our agency staffing, a substantial number do not want to be HSE employees because they like to be able to pick the hours they work, they work shorter time and some are people who have retired early and come back to do various pieces. We have to reduce our dependency on agency staffing. That is the first point.

On management consulting, I said when I came into this job that the HSE spend on management consultants, but more importantly its culture of dependency on management consultants, had outgrown any reasonable sense of what was needed. In essence, we were almost subsidising our workforce with it. We have reduced that by over 30%, as the CFO said, which is a very substantial reduction and saving. Any consulting we now take on is much more competitively priced, is for a much shorter time and much fewer people are linked to that expertise.

Fórsa has a job to do, which is to represent its members, and I do not for one minute propose to be disparaging about that. However, there is no connection between what we spend on management consulting and hiring health and social care professionals. My only issue with hiring health and social care professionals is that I cannot get enough of them. There are several hundred vacancies in physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech and language therapy in disability services alone that I would fill today in a heartbeat if the people were there, but the supply is not there. There is no connection between what we spend on management consulting expertise in one part of the organisation and filling health and social care professional jobs in another. That is simply not the case.

I fully share Fórsa's overall concern about our reliance on management consulting. I hope Fórsa continues to co-operate with us and work with us when we take out that management consulting in different parts of the organisation, and that we can continue to ensure the work is done.