Ms Mary Hayes:

I will start off with just the first part, which was around what we are doing differently or what are we doing to ensure it does not happen again. For ourselves, the CCMA review is absolutely critical because it addresses the key issues for the sector, indirect costs and compliance costs. If we want people to have a certain sinking fund, to have health and safety and for them to be compliant, they are not-for-profit so that money has to come and we have to recognise their indirect as well as their direct costs. There was a very strong recommendation on that.

As regards pensions and increments and respecting the workers who are working in the sector, if we want to retain them and we want skilled workers, then obviously they have to be paid like everybody else. There was broad agreement on that from all of us. Where different agencies are working together, particularly in the area of homelessness where the local authority and the HSE are both actors in the space, there is a need for clarity. For us, we would like to see the clarity around those funding arrangements where there are joint funding arrangements.

In terms of competitive tendering, in the DRHE, one of the actions we want to look at, without the pressure of an actual tender competition, and we are reviewing ourselves, is what alternatives are available to us for the tendering of social services. There is an issue for non-for-profit scaling up. They are not businesses in the traditional sense. I do not have an issue with tendering when it comes to a very straightforward service but I am not sure how well it is lending itself to social services. We are going to look at that when we have a little space and time without a tender pressure on our heads.

Regarding the current tender process, the big issue was with lot 1. Housing first was tendered by the national housing first office. This is Dublin housing first. It was broken into three lots. There were tenders for the two smaller lots but not for the larger one. What that is about is around the sector's nervousness about growth and expansion and making sure that is matched by an income stream, but also its scalability in terms of the difficulties recruiting staff. These are things we will have to be able to manage.