Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Vote 24 - Justice and Equality is one of eight that make up the justice group of Votes.  The others are the Votes for the Prison Service, An Garda Síochána, the Courts Service, the Property Registration Authority, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, the Valuation Office and, beginning in 2016, the Policing Authority.

The 2015 Appropriation Account for Vote 24 - Justice and Equality recorded gross expenditure of just over €366 million in 2015 across six spending programmes, as indicated in the figure on screen. Members can see that programmes A, B, and C account for the bulk of the expenditure. Expenditure of €152 million on the programme to Maintain a Secure Ireland includes expenditure on the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service totalling €47 million and on asylum seekers accommodation of €57 million.  The latter expenditure is the focus of the report being considered this morning on which I will comment shortly.

Spending related to the operations of the Probation Service accounted for €35.5 million of the €51 million of spending under programme B, Work for Safer Communities.

Expenditure on legal aid services accounts for €86 million, or 69%, of the programme on Facilitating the Provision and Administration of Justice.  A further €10 million was spent on the Forensic Science Laboratory and the State Pathology Service. This programme also provided for expenditure of over €10 million on commissions and inquiries, details of which are set out in note 6.3 to the account.  The committee may also wish to note spending under this programme of €5.45 million in respect of the Magdalen fund, as against a funding provision for the year of €11.5 million.

Across the Vote, salaries accounted for 35% of the expenditure. At year end 2015, a total of 2,233 full-time equivalent staff were employed in the Department and the other offices funded from the Vote.

On the receipts side, appropriations-in-aid totalled just over €64 million.  Over 70% of this related to a range of fees charged in respect of immigration registration, nationality and citizenship certification, and visa issuance.

I will now turn to the report before the committee. Since 2000, the State has met its obligation to provide for the material needs of asylum seekers while their applications are being processed by offering accommodation and food at what are known as direct provision centres.  In addition, residents of direct provision centres are entitled to a small weekly allowance paid by the Department of Social Protection and to avail of health and education services funded by the relevant Votes.

The report before the committee this morning examines the procurement and management of contracts for direct provision centres.  As of December 2015, there was a total of 35 direct provision centres in operation - seven State-owned centres and 28 centres provided by 22 commercial suppliers.  Almost 4,700 individuals were being accommodated in the centres at the year end.  The Department also operates two emergency reception and orientation centres to cater for persons who already have refugee status. The total cost to the Department in 2015 of providing accommodation and related services to asylum seekers and refugees was €57 million.

The level of accommodation required is demand led and difficult to predict.  It is influenced by the number of asylum seekers, their length of stay in direct provision and, because there is no obligation to avail of direct provision, the number who opt to do so.

The report notes that in mid-2016, the average length of stay was 38 months with 450 residents, or 10% of the total, living in direct provision for more than seven years.  Some  23% of residents, or 950 people, continued to reside in direct provision even though their cases had been finalised.  This included 667 people or 16% who had been granted a status permitting them to remain in Ireland, and 283 or 7% who were subject to deportation orders.

Two commercial companies were contracted to provide services such as catering, cleaning and maintenance at the seven State-owned centres.  We found that competitive processes had been used to procure those services.

In contrast, the Department had not used competitive processes as set out in public procurement procedures to procure the 28 commercially-owned and run centres.  Instead, it seeks expressions of interest, evaluates the responses and then agrees contract terms with selected providers.  The Department’s view is that this equates to the negotiated procedure provided for in EU procurement rules. However, use of that procedure is only permitted in certain limited circumstances that we could not see existed in regard to direct provision. The Department stated that it discussed the matter with the Office of Government Procurement but had not identified a procurement method to replace the current procedure.

The examination also found that effective management of contracts was made more difficult because not all contract deliverables had been expressed in a way that could be quantified or measured.  This increased the risk that standards of accommodation and services would not meet asylum seekers' needs or would be inconsistent between centres.  In addition, contracts did not set performance measures and there was limited provision for penalties for underperformance by suppliers.  The Department agreed to the report's recommendation to review the standard contract, and the Accounting Officer will be able to update the committee in that regard.

Service delivery in the centres is monitored by physical inspections of premises, information clinics for residents of centres and reviews of complaints by residents.  However, the findings from this monitoring are not collated and used to assess service delivery performance.  The Department committed to introduce procedures to formally record such inspection findings and complaints, which should inform discussions with centre managers and owners.

Even though there was a low level of complaints by residents, information from other sources suggests that there is a significant level of dissatisfaction among residents about the quality of the accommodation, the services provided, or both. A revised complaints procedure introduced in 2015 provided for an appeal to an independent appeals officer where a person was not satisfied with how his or her complaint was dealt with. However, at the time of the examination, an independent appeals officer had yet to be appointed.

The report recommended that the Department review the complaints process to identify reasons why residents may not be raising issues. The Department noted that the revised complaints procedure largely addressed this issue but undertook to examine ways to make the complaints process more open and transparent. Members may also be aware that, from early April this year, residents of direct provision can now bring a complaint to the Ombudsman, or to the Ombudsman for Children, if they are unhappy with how their original complaint was dealt with.