Mr. Stephen Kent:

I will comment on the customer service aspect. I regret if somebody has not got through. It is not for lack of trying and we will have to do better. That is all I can say, and we commit to trying to review it every year. We looked at this last year. We do not want to find ourselves on this side of the fence having to defend this position, that is the reality. Last year we listened to a number of issues that arose to see if we could improve on it. We tried to put in place a system that we thought could address a lot of the queries that were going to come in. It is compressed into such a short time and we end up experiencing a huge volume. In trying to predict what that volume would be, given the situation, we obviously did not clear the hurdle.

We took 35,000 calls into our centre and put in 15 extra people to be able to receive the calls. Their job was to liaise within the individual functions, deal with the cases and ensure a response was issued. That was happening and in addition to that we had our own call centre. In the last few weeks coming up into August they were taking 1,200 calls a day. We were trying to deal with it also in our central office, where we dealt with about 10,000 emails on individual cases. I could give the committee all the statistics it wants but I know it would not provide the answer. The reality is that it was hugely compressed into a two to three week period when we had to deal with that volume. It was not for lack of resource; we just obviously believed that the resource we were putting in place might have been adequate. In this instance, we have obviously fallen short. We will just have to take that as a learning for next year and see if we can improve on it.

On the close-off date for mainstream, we made huge efforts to get all of those applications in by 27 July. That allows us a brief window to get our services and the routes set up and, if necessary, tendered. It is a very brief window to try to deal with all the queries that come in. They do not come in sequentially but all in different places with different schools. We are still charged with a responsibility to the State and to the scheme to make sure that we are not doing it inefficiently so we are trying to load those buses and make sure there are sufficient people on every bus and we are utilising the vehicle and driver to the best of our ability. There is always juggling in respect of trying to load up, maximise the capacity of eligible children on those buses and make sure we deploy them efficiently and then, where we can, find out what we have to deal with on a concessionary basis.

I can only say that I regret the Deputy had certain instances where she had to call 15 times. That is certainly not what our provision is set up to do. We thought we would be in a much better place in that regard and I ask the Deputy to bear in mind that we were, because we know how many are after being put on it. At the moment we have 101,000 people deployed. Out there travelling today are 115,000 children who were put on the buses by our staff and the people who were deployed to put in the customer service provision. We are charged with trying to get up in the morning to try to make sure that no child is left by the side of the road and we were successful in that for 115,000, which is about 98% to 99% of what came at us. Always, the game will be about trying to close that 1% and I think that is what we will strive to do better with next year.