I shall not read it all, but I will go through a few of its elements.
I thank the Chairman and members for their invitation. Although it was sent to the chairman of the authority and me, the chairman is not available because of commitments in Belfast, as I explained to the clerk. He is keen to attend a meeting of the committee, though, so it is my suggestion that I liaise with the clerk to come up with a date that is suitable for the committee and us. I emphasise that his absence is due to the shortness of the notice ahead of today's meeting, but he is anxious to attend a meeting and answer any questions the committee asks.
As Senator Walsh mentioned, we have circulated copies of the statement, so I will run through some of its key points, after which we will be happy to take members' questions.
The introduction sets out the statement of strategy. As far as the authority is concerned, the statement will be our most critical policy document for the next three years. The budget is inextricably linked with the strategy. The strategy's content provides a framework for the objectives and workplan of the organisation and the budget which supports the activities to be undertaken. This is an important dimension of our current position. I would argue that these are standard business planning provisions, in that one would not finalise a budget unless one had agreed the period's objectives and workplan.
The second paragraph of the introduction provides the background to the proposed development of the strategy. I wish to emphasise a number of key factors. As members are aware, the full authority was not in place at the time, in that the nominees of the joint Oireachtas committee did not join until February. A clear policy decision was made by the five members appointed in October by the Minister that they would not undertake policy development work until the full complement of members was in place. This is an important dimension of the background. The first meeting attended by the four members nominated through the process undertaken by this committee occurred in February and it was March when they considered their first major policy issue, namely, the strategy development. Many of the Act's provisions were made on the basis that a full authority would be in place, but it was not full for a certain period. This impacted on the way in which we planned and undertook our work.
As obliged, we ran a tendering process for two major pieces of work and commenced the strategy development in June. The first work was a detailed stakeholder consultation and the second was an economic and environmental analysis. These pieces of work were conducted in the June-August period, after which we moved into phase 2. That will be completed by the end of this month and we will put the draft strategy out for consultation in early November. In our initial plans, we had hoped to have the draft strategy by the end of September. The budget would have followed it, as the draft strategy would have needed the support of a budget. When we wrote to the Minister in May, this was our ambition. There is no question that it was an ambitious timeframe. There was demand from the industry for us to consult widely on this strategy, given that it was such a key piece of work. Of its nature, the consultancy we undertook involved many people. One of the challenges brought up in the process was a simple logistical one, namely, the availability of key people during the summer to complete the work. People simply were not there — they were on holidays and came back. Rather than miss anyone in the consultation process, our desire was to engage with everybody. When I came back from holidays in late August it was clear there was further work to be done to complete the strategy. We made a decision at that point, supported by the authority. There was an authority meeting in early September and we made a decision at executive level to push back the completion of the strategy to the end of October. In our view it followed that the budget would also move back from that perspective. We shall now run until the end of October. As I stated, there is a meeting on 26 October which will address both the three-year budget and the strategy. That will be approved at the meeting and will be put out to public consultation in early November, as required under the Act.
I move to the three-year budget planning exercise. Our main focus, as mentioned several times in the document, is that it should be a robust, thorough exercise. We were asked to do as much both by this committee when we attended here last March, and by the industry at a number of meetings. What the industry seeks most during this period of great difficulty for the sector is to have as much certainty as possible in terms of what its members are likely to have to pay to fund the authority over the next three-year period. That is the thinking we have been engaged in during the finalisation of the budget.
There are a number of relevant points. It is the first full year of the authority so there is not as much certainty in a new organisation as there would be in an older one. We have introduced a much greater focus on achieving savings and have given commitments in this regard. We were asked many questions when we attended this committee last March and also have given commitments to the sector. In addition, as an organisation we have commitments under the Croke Park agreement to look for efficiencies and savings. We place a great focus on that in terms of what we have achieved.
A statutory deadline is in place — we acknowledge we have missed that. However, as I argue in the submission, we will have a much better and more robust document that will be of greater benefit to the sector. I emphasise that important point now, as I did in the document. It ties in with commitments we gave in the past, both to the committee and the sector.
Currently, we are finalising the document. There will be two days of meetings before we finalise the budget document that will go to the board on Tuesday week. We have detailed meetings with the managers in each area who have been asked to look at every line of spend they have and to look at the statute and identify what is absolutely required over the period in order to make the document as robust as possible. That is ongoing. In parallel, we are looking at the forecast spend for the current year, again to give us a sense of where things stand.
There was an article in The Sunday Times last Sunday — I know I should not pay too much attention to what is said in newspapers — that suggested we had already reached the budget we had set ourselves for the current year. I wish to make it clear that is not true. The writer got our budget wrong: it is actually €5.7 million for which we have levied the sector — he said it was €6 million and that we had reached it already. I state for the record of the joint committee that our budget was €5.65 million and we will achieve savings on that figure for 2010. Our outturn for the full year will come in under that figure because of the savings regime we have introduced. It is important to make that point. The document will look at the outturn for 2010 and provide a detailed, line by line budget for 2011 and will consider a high-level budget for 2012-13. The purpose is to give certainty, which is what the sector has requested.
In terms of our engagement with the stakeholders, when we made the decision in late August we recognised we would be pushing the budget back for a month while there was an expectation from stakeholders we would have it in place. We recognise that in the context of their planning it was important for us to address these issues so we arranged to contact what we describe as the key industry players, namely, RTE, TG4, TV3 and Independent Broadcasters of Ireland, IBI, which represents the commercial radio sector, in particular local radio, regarding our approach to development and the revised approach we were taking. No concern was expressed about the approach and from the reaction we got at the time it appeared they were happy with and understood the logic of it. That is important and in the second part of the submission, I addressed what we said to them. We met with the IBI more than six weeks ago, on 1 September, and informed it how the budget stood and our plans for it, and also advised that there would be very few changes in our costs. One thing we told IBI members was that we had received a letter from the Department concerning the employment control framework for each organisation. People will be familiar with this. Each public sector organisation has now been given, in effect, its numbers for the next three-year period. At the time we had greater certainty about what the numbers were likely to be and the Department indicated to us that our numbers were set at a maximum as those we had when we were the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, BCI.
