Rate Collection Agency (Hansard, 21 February 1996)

§ Mr. Moss

Responsibility for the subject in question has been delegated to the Rate Collection Agency under its chief executive, Mr. D. W. Gallagher. I have asked him to arrange for a reply to be given.

Letter from D. W. Gallagher to Mr. Eddie McGrady, dated 16 February 1996: I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question about contracting out of work by the Rate Collection Agency. The Agency contracts out all printing work, together with the handling procedures required to issue communications to ratepayers. There are 2 elements to this: the annual billing exercise and the daily round of revised rate accounts, refunds, Housing Benefit information, instalment reminders, etc. The annual billing exercise involves the issue of around 450,000 accounts at I April each year. It would be neither cost effective nor practicable for the RCA to be resourced in terms of staff and equipment to handle work volumes of this magnitude on a once a year basis. The task must of necessity be contracted out. After an open competition conducted under EC regulations, open to both public and private sectors, a 3 year contract has recently been awarded to a private sector firm. Costs are commercial in confidence, but I can assure you that value for money was an important factor in deciding the successful bidder. 170W Handling the daily round of output from the RCA requires sophisticated printing, collating, and enveloping machinery. Although the RCA could do this work internally, at roughly the same cost as the private sector, transfer of the risk associated with back up for the machinery, staffing, etc, swung the balance in favour of contracting out. This contract was also awarded through competition where value for money was a key factor. Again, costs are commercial in confidence. To date the contractors have proved more than satisfactory in service delivery. Like many businesses, the Agency has to deal with peaks and troughs of work. Recently, it was decided to seek outside help in opening 7,600 replies from ratepayers received as a result of a special exercise. As this proved cost-effective and allowed staff to concentrate on other duties the Agency will continue to examine how this sort of approach might be used to manage future workload peaks. The Rate Collection Agency is conscious that the cost of collecting the rates is ultimately borne by the ratepayers of Northern Ireland and will continue to seek the most cost effective means of carrying out its functions while at the same time providing a good quality service to its ratepayer customers.