Dr. Aideen Hartney:

I will do my best to answer some of those questions and will then pass to my colleagues. Every public body will say a little bit more would help us do a little bit more. We have a large range of functions. For each function, we can assign perhaps two people or three at the very most. That allows us to deliver on our duties. If there were increasing demands from Departments or additional functions, we would have to look at that again. For the recent statutory functions assigned to us, we are lucky to have been assigned some resourcing envelope to go with them. I do not want to say it is all dependent on resources; we manage our work plan according to the capacity we currently have.

On advising local authority planners, we have engagement with local authorities and make submissions to county development plans, highlighting the importance of universal design. We would like to monitor performance against the code of practice that is awaiting approval. That would be another monitoring function which would show areas that need further focus. Good work is being done at local authority level, for example, on the ageing side. There are lots of synergies and areas for potential collaboration on the disability side. If that could be more structured at local authority level, it would achieve a lot. On the question of whether we get involved in financial advice, we might do cost-benefit analyses in our work.

I take the Deputy's point about the personalised budgets pilot which has been going on much longer than any of us would like. We are charged with the evaluation of the current pilot phase. I would put some caveats on the report that will come out of that, probably early next year, that the financial information will not be sufficient to allow us to say X amount is needed for X profile of need. That would be a matter for the HSE in an implementation phase. We can provide learning and guidance as to key principles that need to be followed in implementation.

Dr. Tamming will comment on CDNTs.