Ms Tara Collins:

It is true that our contact centre is another vital channel for our communications with end users and other stakeholders. As the Deputy is aware, our dedicated line for political representatives is included in the contact centre. The team in the contact centre has doubled in size in the past 12 months. We are meeting all of our service level agreements. The team there strives to provide seamless experiences across all of our touch points, which include telephone, email and all of our social networks. In addition to our marketing activities on social media where we proactively market, we also man the social networks in terms of responding to all of the queries that come in. The role of the contact centre is to provide information on the roll-out of the programme primarily and register stakeholders for email updates because in respect of feeding into our take-up, we need to create demand and be able to communicate directly with end users. We have just exceeded 50,000 registrations so we are communicating directly with 50,000 people in the intervention area.

The Deputy's other question concerned the quantities. We are managing 350 to 500 points of contact every week. In busier times, this can go up to about 600. The maximum we have seen on a weekly basis is about 600 points of contact but we are well manned. The operation is outsourced to the Rigneydolphin Group with which we have a very good relationship. We are very happy with the level of service it is providing. It is also managed in-house through my team via our head of customer experience so it is tightly managed.