Ms Rachel Cassen:

There is definitely a pent-up demand for personal budgets. Currently, I think 52 people are at stage 4 - the living their life stage - on the personal budgets demonstration project. There are upwards of 250 individuals who have put forward an expression of interest but have not yet started with a personal budget.

What happens to those people and pent-up demand? My strong sense is that the evaluation, which is due to be published in quarter 1 next year, will not show really strong outcomes from a personal budgets approach because of underresourcing. There has been chronic underresourcing of the project because of Covid. At the time, one staff member was taken across to work on procuring personal protective equipment and was not even working on this project. There are other difficulties that have fatigued the project in its long duration.

What are we going to do if the outcomes from that evaluation are weak? Is that it and we are saying we are walking away? I do not think we have that choice. That is where legislation is really important because legislation will drive personal budgets. My belief is that the HSE will then get behind them and we will begin to move forward but they cannot come off the table. For such an important enabler, we really need to be committed to keeping them on the table and expanding and resourcing them properly.