Mr. Alan Murphy:

In the first year the cost of document management was €2 million. The figure rose in the second year - I am talking about financial years - to €2.7 million, and for the last year it cost €979,000.

Apart from the factor of forecasting and the decline in the number of documents, what has really driven increasing costs is the fact that we are dealing with more students. In our first year we dealt with 70,000 and in this coming year we will deal with 115,000. All of those students will call. Having managed to reduce documents in our first year, and continuing to do so year-on-year, we must take on the challenge of reducing the requirement for students to call us. The increasing number of students - handling their calls and dealing with the work involved - is a driver of cost. Also, there are things we can do to provide them with information through other channels in order to make sure they do not need to call us - through our website, through outreach services and so on.