Q71 Dr Pugh: Will you get any money?
Mr Friedlos: Some of those vacations in the contract can happen without any additional payments to us and some of the vacations require some additional payments.
Q72 Dr Pugh: Can you tell us how much money you will get?
Mr Friedlos: I cannot tell you exactly how much money we will get; it will depend on the timing and the exact pattern of those vacations.
Q73 Dr Pugh: Let us assume the hypothesis is that they all go, as the Permanent Secretary has said, in 2010 and 2011. Could you send us a note saying how much payment you will get as a result of that?
Mr Friedlos: We will clarify that.
Q74 Dr Pugh: There are going to be additional costs in moving out of these 130 places and I would like to turn to Mr Hartnett. You presumably calculated the cost of accommodating those staff who will be moved out of them?
Mr Hartnett: That is really one for Mr Bowles.
Mr Bowles: That depends ultimately on how many of the staff affected leave the organisation and how many are redeployed.
Q75 Dr Pugh: You must know what your need of staff is and presumably you do not have the buildings for staff from 130 offices at the moment, do you?
Mr Bowles: No.
Q76 Dr Pugh: So are you going to have to purchase some more buildings?
Ms Strathie: No, we have 2,4003 people in those buildings; 1,9004 will transfer to other locations which have already been agreed. People there concerned had already volunteered for that and did. The remainder, 1,4505 have been given a range of options around severance; we are not going to acquire new buildings, they will move to one of the strategic locations.
Q77 Dr Pugh: I understand all that. What I am trying to get at is that you must be working with some working assumptions about what would be the cost of re-accommodating staff from 130 offices elsewhere and that has to be factored into the exercise; I assume it will.
Ms Strathie: Yes, that is the case.
Q78 Dr Pugh: If you can give us any information on that it would be very helpful.6 According to a letter I have received from Mr Hartnett, enquiry centres, in all these offices presumably, will be retained in their current locations or nearby. I assume not their current locations because that would make the property more difficult to sell. Do you have a figure in your budget which illustrates the amount you will need to keep all these enquiry offices open?
Ms Strathie: We always intended to retain face to face because that was part of the consultation.
Q79 Dr Pugh: Do you still intend?
Ms Strathie: We do still intend. As you will know from the letter I sent, on 59 of those we are open to consultation as to whether they are full time.
Q80 Dr Pugh: What I am getting at is that you are going to have to find new premises to keep these enquiry offices open in the place they are supposed to be open and Mr Hartnett said they will be open. That has a cost; that has a figure. I assume in your planning you know something and you can give us this.7
Ms Strathie: Let me start with service. Just to be clear, we are not closing any face-to-face locations we have; these are back office people. We are talking here about ceasing business where we had business because it has already moved some time ago and people have been involved in other work. In many cases this is a floor of a building, so if it came to it at the margins that the only way we could vacate was because there was a much better deal to put that small business face to face elsewhere, we would work with the partners to do that.
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3 Note by witness: This figure is revised to 3,150.
4 Note by witness: This figure is revised to 1,450.
5 Note by witness: This figure is revised to 1,700.