Mr. David Kelly:

I mentioned this earlier, so I am sorry for repeating myself. I cannot remember if the Deputy was here for this part. When local authorities are tendering for a service, there has to be some account for expenditure money and some process by which contracts are awarded. Local authorities will run a procurement process. There was never any policy that there should be a deficit model. One of the learnings from this has to be to ensure that services in the future are fully funded and that they are not augmented by fundraising and subject to the volatility of that. Therefore, the State going forward will fully fund services. The housing first model was a new concept. It has been introduced over the last few years. When a local authority was running a procurement process, there was not that historical data to try to benchmark how much it should cost for these. I would say it probably was not quite as apparent. However, over the last couple of years since then, it has become apparent that the model put forward was not sustainable due to the reliance on fundraising, but there was also probably a deficit in the budgeting in terms of the estimation of the actual costs involved.

On the other thing I mentioned, when a local authority runs a procurement process, we will become aware of the person awarded that contract. The local authority will need to put a service proposal into the Department to say it is proposing to deliver a service, this is the cost and this is the person who will deliver it. We would not have any visibility in relation to how much other service providers had tendered for it. It is becoming clearer now, but it was not clear at the time.