Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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I appreciate that. When representatives from Bank of Ireland, AIB, KBC and Ulster Bank appeared before the committee they told us about the number of staff they were hiring. As Mr. O'Connell said, it is quite opaque because the number being hired included people who had been there for a couple of years and were being transferred from contracts that really should be counted as full time anyway so it was not additional staff. Ulster Bank representatives claimed they had hired an additional 50 telephone staff to manage personal customers, 60 full-time employees to support business customers, 100 staff rising to 300 at peak levels across all channels. KBC increased staff numbers in the contact centre by 30% in the past 12 months with a 25% increase in staffing in its operations centre. AIB claimed it would deploy 70 additional staff to help deal with the influx of new customers and Bank of Ireland advised it was in the process of recruiting 100 additional contact centre staff and had mobilised dedicated programmes. It claimed it had put an additional 500 people in place with 420 of those contract positions. When I asked if they had been letting staff go, they suggested they had not. Mr. O'Connell has given this committee the number of, I believe, 3,200 over the past two years.