Mr. Michael Doyle:

Mr. Dalton spoke about the personalised budget for an organisation that operates PA services, which we do. A number of actions can be taken in relation to recruitment and retention. The biggest one is that we are recruiting people to do a shift for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, perhaps. This is an outdated approach to how this works. Even in the HSE and other jurisdictions, we need to be recruiting people where they are guaranteed so many hours for a period. If an individual whom they are supporting as a personal assistant goes on holidays or winds up in hospital, there needs to be a guarantee that their salary will be paid. At the moment, only contact time is paid and that is a major disincentive. We already discussed social welfare and the cap. That is something that is reasonably easy to address without adding anything to the costs for the Government - it is just a process that needs to be addressed. There are some easy wins, low-hanging fruit, that could be picked off here. We have been bringing those forward and it is something worth looking at again.