Official Report: Minutes of Evidence
Committee for Finance, meeting on Wednesday, 23 September 2026
Members present for all or part of the proceedings:
Mr Matthew O'Toole (Chairperson)
Ms Diane Forsythe (Deputy Chairperson)
Dr Steve Aiken OBE
Miss Deirdre Hargey
Mr Harry Harvey
Mr Brian Kingston
Mr Eóin Tennyson
Inquiry into the Performance and Culture of the Northern Ireland Civil Service
The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Agenda item 9 is Committee deliberations on the inquiry into the performance and culture of the Civil Service (NICS). We will take more evidence on the inquiry next week, will we not?
The Committee Clerk: Yes.
The Committee Clerk: Yes. The HOCS will be here next week.
The Committee Clerk: That will be on a different matter: transformation funding.
The Committee Clerk: It is one of those complex things, Chair. The HOCS volunteered to come to the Committee to present evidence on the transformation budget: to look at drawdown from tranche 1 and the prospects for tranche 2. We have asked for all the figures for tranche 1 — the drawdowns that have already been taken — and the figures for what is listed and profiled for tranche 2, which are the programmes and so on. We flagged up the fact that there might be some tangential questions. It would, however, be cleaner and easier if there were a separate invitation for the HOCS to attend to give evidence on the inquiry, because then the evidence session would be wholly about that, making it easier for us to kind of —.
The Committee Clerk: It will be useful to have her there and to make that invitation in person, then we can follow up in writing. Once the Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill has been dealt with — we are very much within our timescales on that — we anticipate that the inquiry will become our key piece of work, other than awaiting the Budget.
The Committee Clerk: We will, therefore, have a reasonable amount of time to bring the likes of the HOCS in for —
The Committee Clerk: — follow-up. It will also mean that we will have time freed up in which we can bring in the Fiscal Council with its reports and so on. It will give us a little flexibility.
The Committee Clerk: Chair, it may, however, be useful if the Committee focuses on the transformation fund for the briefing next week. As Committee members will have seen talk of transformation funding in the initial document circulated by the Secretary of State —
The Committee Clerk: — it might be interesting to see whether the HOCS has any understanding of what that means. Members will recall that the transformation fund relates to the previous Executive restoration settlement. Is there a suggestion that that will be a permanent thing that is continued? It would be useful if she were to clarify how that works.
The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): The head of the Civil Service will be here, and we agree not to stray into random extraneous topics. Given the context and the absence of a Budget, however, she will, obviously, expect to be asked about the situation with governance and running the Administration in the absence of a Budget. I do not think that it is unreasonable for her to answer questions on that.
Dr Aiken: I know that she will want to keep to the terms of reference of chair of the board or whatever it is — the transformation board and all the rest of it. They will be listening in, anyhow, but there should be a degree of latitude.
The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Yes. As Chair, I will allow that, within reason. We should, however, have some —. It is not reasonable to expect someone to come in and answer questions on anything and everything —
Dr Aiken: around transformation, I would suggest.
The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): — and the Clerk made a fair point, which is that we are carrying out a specific inquiry into the Civil Service. In an evidence session on the transformation fund, the question of funding more generally is a fair one to ask in broad terms.
Right, we will move on to talk about the other Committee deliberations. There is correspondence from the Department at page 153 of the Committee pack regarding the procurement of a replacement contract for the supply of agency workers to the NICS. The contract will commence on 5 October 2026 and operate, initially, for a period of three years, with the ability to be extended to up to eight years. The projected value of the contract over eight years is £1·44 billion, which:
"does not represent committed or actual expenditure."
Of that, £1 billion is the estimated expenditure for DFC work, and 66% of the £1 billion is servicing the DWP contract and is therefore considered to be cost-neutral, which means that the Department has effectively paid for a contractor to do the work on behalf of the DWP.
That is a very large amount of money. Use of agency workers, overall agency spend and how that relates to permanency, the inability to make use of temporary promotions, and, indeed, sickness and absence are actually related. It is an important issue and one that has come up in our questions. We need to establish whether there is a specific plan to bring agency spend down relative to total spend, alongside dealing with sickness absence, the use of temporary promotions, the insecurity of promotions and all of that.
Ms Forsythe: Could we request the information in a slightly different form? When the Department refers to the £1·44 billion for the framework, it always mentions that £1 billion of that is for DFC. That implies that it is all to do with the UK-contracted DWP work, but we now read that only 66% of that is spent on servicing the DWP contract. It is all classified as agency spend, but the non-DWP contract spend is managed in a completely different way. Taking the DWP contract spending out of the framework spend leaves £360 million. If we add that to the £0·44 billion, we see that £750 million is spent on that agency framework. Not long ago, that figure sat somewhere between about £300,000 and £400,000, so we need to extract information on that. We should ask for all the numbers with the DWP element removed. Saying that the figure is £1·44 billion with £1 billion of that being for DFC implies that it is all related to the DWP contract, but there is a substantial number of agency workers in DFC. From hearing about a number of issues, I know that agency NICS staff sit side by side with DWP-contracted staff in DFC on significantly poorer terms and conditions and that that creates an issue between staff and causes problems in DFC. I wonder whether we could get the details of everything that has been spent other than on the DWP contract and how the total, whatever that is, has varied over the contract period.
It would also be good to see how much spend came off the framework each year and what the projected framework budget is for each year. The Department might say, "That is just the framework; that is not what we are going to spend", but there was a substantial overspend on the previous framework at the end of the period. I would like to know whether, within its mechanisms, the Department sets a budget for agency staff every year and, if so, what that is.
The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Those are all really good questions. That is fair. I will try to summarise the questions. We will ask for the information that we have been given but with the figures relating to the DWP contract stripped out. We accept that DWP work is done under contract: it is covered by the same framework, but it is separate. What we are trying to establish is the volume of agency spend in the Northern Ireland Civil Service that is for regular work in the Northern Ireland Civil Service. We want a time series that illustrates whether that is going up or down or is broadly stable and, year by year, how it compares with the limits agreed in the framework that existed in whichever year we are talking about. Diane, you talked about there being an overspend on the previous framework.
Ms Forsythe: To be clear, I am talking about overspending on the framework over a number of years. I am really concerned that the Department will say, "There is a framework, so we do not set a budget for this every year".
Ms Forsythe: Given that there is a framework for a few hundred million pounds that covers three to four years, I would be interested to know whether the Department sits down every year and says, "This is our budget — our limit — for spending on agency staff", and how it performs against that budget each year rather than against the framework at the end of the period, when there has been a significant extension of it.
Ms Forsythe: It makes sense in my head. Apologies if it does not.
The Committee Clerk: It does. I have it written down.
Dr Aiken: Do we know what mechanism DWP uses for oversight of that expenditure and how the money is spent?
The Committee Clerk: DWP will require a control system. Absolutely: let us find out.
Dr Aiken: In all the conversations that we have had, I have never heard about DWP asking, "Are we getting good value for money? Is it being used effectively? What is being delivered?". I have not seen a thing.
The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): DWP's view of it. OK.
OK. We will get that down, and we will copy it to the Communities Committee, if members are content. If members are content, we will add to the evidence base the Hansard reports of the Committee's deliberations from last week and on 9 September.
Members indicated assent.