Dr. Alison Harnett:

I can come in on some of the questions and will welcome the input of my colleagues. I thank the Deputy for her questions. On staffing, pay parity and the update from the WRC, the agreement that was made was for an 8% uplift, which was very welcome and certainly something that was achieved for workers in section 39 organisations.

However, since that has been agreed there has been a 10.5% agreement for the public sector and section 38 workers and so, unfortunately, that gap is widening again. If you were in a section 39 organisation seeking to recruit people to work in your service on behalf of the citizens, who have the same rights as all of the citizens who are supported by section 38 or HSE services, it is very hard to convince a potential staff member that you are offering the same package where there is already a 10.5% uplift on the table for staff working in section 38 organisations. The WRC agreement for the 8% is being concluded in terms of the payment and all the processes at the moment. The new talks, which began this month, are to look at how we will close that gap and get to a situation of pay parity every time there is an uplift in the pay of section 38 and HSE workers. The citizens who access services that happen to be funded by a section 39 agreement need to be assured that they too will be treated with parity just as the citizens who access those supports have equal rights. The talks aim to get to pay parity by the end of the successor to this agreement and I hope that will be achieved. We welcome the support of all Members of the House in focusing on that issue for the rights of people supported by any kind of section 38, section 39 or HSE services.

In terms of the qualifying piece, I might leave the recruitment questions for some of my colleagues and I might briefly speak to the Deputy's question about assessing changing need and what would address that. My colleagues will have lots to say as well. With regard to changing need, I will give a couple of very important statistics. My understanding is that the gene on which Alzheimer's disease sits that there are three copies of that gene for a person with Down's syndrome, to take an example. That means that many more people with Down's syndrome develop Alzheimer's disease in earlier age groups. Many of the people we support who have Down's syndrome would have Alzheimer's disease in their 40s. In general terms the IDS-TILDA project has identified a vast range of matters to do with intellectual disability and ageing and it is a very valuable study. What it does show is that there is premature ageing for people with intellectual disabilities and that means their needs change too. For instance, if we had a sleeping house where the staff sleep overnight, that can change very quickly to the need for a waking night staff. Similarly, in day services, where somebody might have needed support within a group of people, their needs may become that of one-to-one support. Currently, there is no budget line in the funding provided to our services for changing need, and so people make business cases or try to move funding around when somebody's needs change. What would help is if there were a structured model of assessing needs as people's needs change and that it would lead to a clear pathway to funding their different needs that have now occurred as a result of the change associated with their ageing.

There is a movement to provide career guidance in special schools, and that is something for which the National Federation of Voluntary Service Providers has advocated very strongly for a number of years, so we welcome the news there is due to be some progress in that area because, as mentioned in our opening statement, we need to be extremely ambitious and have a vision for the young people we support in our schools. They have exciting lives ahead of them and goals they can achieve if they are listened to, understood and they are helped with their goals, along with their families, to have a broad image of what can happen in life that includes employment, education and full integration in community life. Careers guidance counselling in special schools is a very important part of that.

I invite some of my colleagues to join the discussion, in particular with regard to recruitment and retention and the day service capacity for people with additional and greater needs.