Ms Clare McGrath:

We have taken on board what the Comptroller and Auditor General said in respect of how we might determine the savings. My colleague from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform might talk about that for the future. When the National Procurement Service was set up in 2009, our priority was to leverage the State's covenant to maximise savings and to get contracts in place. The estimation of the savings predicted was to an extent based on estimates of what we think the use of the contracts would be, with the actual figures for the consumption of the products for which we were placing contracts to come afterwards. We were doing estimations without the actual data. We are now taking real figures about what is happening and real comparitors. We set up a group at the end of 2012 to take the guidelines on how we decide and determine savings. That working group has taken on board what has been raised by the Comptroller and Auditor General and is reporting to the National Procurement Service with a view to how we do this in the future.