Ms Sheenagh Rooney:

I thank the Deputy for her comments. We welcome the feedback. She is correct. The scale of accommodation provision we have been overseeing, with 61,000 people since the conflict started, has been immensely challenging. When everyone arrives into Citywest or wherever on that first day, the most important thing for us is that they get safety and shelter.

We are only at the stage now where we have been able to concentrate on bringing improvements to our own processes as we have ramped up our resources. In that regard, we now have more than 160 staff. We are grateful to other Departments that seconded valuable staff with valuable skill sets to our Department. We obviously still have vacancies and we will continue to be prioritised for those vacancies, but we have used those additional resources to address some of the key challenges the Deputy has highlighted. We are not there yet on some of them, but we will get there. Having the offer portal up and running has really helped us streamline. We have one portal for all offers, because members may remember a previous frustration of Members was they were not getting a response to the offers. Not to dwell on the detail, but one of the biggest challenges for us was we were getting so many offers from so many different sources to so many different email addresses it was impossible to keep track of while doing the day job, given the numbers we had at the time. We have worked really hard to improve that.

To reassure the committee, there are strong checks and balances in there that check for fire safety, tax compliance and see pictures of the rooms. We are not visiting the sites, just to be clear, but we have an oversight regime. We have a system whereby any provider, or indeed any Ukrainian, can contact us with a concern. We receive 375 tickets, as we call them, every week. Where we see accommodation concerns we investigate them. We have undertaken 78 inspections. We have walked away from some providers. Local authorities help us in that way. On the payment system, we have got additional staff and we have outsourced. We have spent €500 million so far this year. We are putting out on average €30 million every week. There is a huge amount of transactions, but we are also putting in place more automated processes so we can do it even quicker. We are making a lot of progress there and we will get fully on top of it in a very short period of time. We are certainly receiving far fewer queries on that and we are satisfied more people are being paid on time.

On the community engagement side, we continue to increase our efforts. On the beneficiaries of temporary protection, BOTP, side, we rely heavily on the community response fora. We share information daily on where Ukrainians are being located. There is a whole infrastructure there for the community response fora to look at the services. Similarly to what my colleague, Ms Baxter, has said, we have secondees in from the Departments of Health and Education who try to help us keep an eye on where we are putting people so we can match them to services. In summary, there absolutely are challenges. We see them and we will work hard to improve them.