LATER this week, a Government group charged with examining how the €1.5bn disability budget is spent will hold its last meeting to sign off on its final report. Its mission, as part of the Government's "value for money review", was to establish whether taxpayers' money was wisely spent. The report, which will go to the Minister for Health James Reilly later this month, is understood to highlight a range of inefficiencies. It throws up such issues as the cost of transport, catering, and overlapping services. But according to reports last week, one of the main findings is that 85 per cent of the €1.5bn disability budget is spent on staff. That leaves €230m for everything else. On the face of it, the figure seems huge. But as any parent of a severely disabled child will testify, their greatest need is human intervention in the form of therapeutic care, respite care and hands-on therapies. Disability is a labour-intensive business, according to John Dolan, chief executive of the Disability Federation of Ireland, and far from being bloated, there are not enough staff to cope. "The demographics are going against us. People are living longer. Children that wouldn't have survived birth are now surviving," said Dolan. According to sources, the big issue for the "value for money" team was not so much staff numbers as staff costs, the services provided and the proliferation of overlapping organisations, funded directly or indirectly by the State to provide services to the growing population of people with disabilities. The report will show that the salaries for people working in the disability sector are almost twice the sums earned in other countries. But the same is true for teachers, hospital consultants, gardai and other frontline staff who work in the Irish public service. The Government has agreed that public-sector salaries are off limits. Tied up in the Croke Park agreement, public sector salaries are frozen rather than slashed in return for employees being more flexible. Eamon Walsh, a disability campaigner and Labour Party representative, claims that Croke Park is affecting frontline services. He claimed that the Brothers of Charity in Galway had diverted money from frontline services for people with disabilities to meet the cost of incremental pay increases due to mostly junior staff under the Croke Park agreement. Faced with the refusal of the HSE to cover the cost of the incremental increases, the Brothers of Charity went to the Labour Court, which told the Brothers they had to pay out of their own budget. "When I mentioned this before, I got a huge backlash from the unions," he said. "But someone has to grab that bull by the horns and run with it." The pay of senior executives working for these disability groups is another matter. Three years ago, Mary Harney, then health minister, said she was "disturbed" to find that some chief executives were on salaries of €90,000 to €176,000 at a time when the frontline services they provided were being severely cut. The Brothers of Charity employed six regional chief executives on salaries of €90,000-€113,000, but their salaries could not be cut because they were on public-sector contracts. One of the biggest earners is Angela Kerins, the chief executive of Rehab, who disclosed that she earned €234,000. Rehab pointed out that her salary was paid from the organisation's commercial activities rather than its €36m HSE grant. The Department of Health remains exercised by the executive pay in disability organisations, according to an internal department memo published earlier this year: "We are finding agencies generally are not particularly transparent about owning up to the source of funding for their chief executive salaries or are stating that they are in line with the consolidated scales (approximately €150,000 per annum), where we know that they are most likely topped up from other funds." The "value for money" review is also expected to recommend merging services. This will not only reduce the number of executives generously paid from the State purse, but will cut out administration-heavy organisations. How many advocacy groups does a sector need? People with Disabilities, a national lobby group, has already fallen by the wayside -- its €900,000 grant was scrapped last year. Kathleen Lynch, the junior health minister, explained that "unfortunately the majority of the funding was going on administration and running their national headquarters. That was never what it was about". With cuts to respite care, home help hours and therapeutic services, the need for efficiencies in the disability sector has never been greater. Seven hundred children with serious intellectual disability will leave school this month in need of ongoing therapy, but parents fear there is no place for them. The report may well provide the momentum to cut the middle man and let the money follow those with disabilities: funding the individual rather than the service providers. "Even if you start moving things around very radically, there is still going to be a problem because of the greater demand for services and supports," said John Dolan. - Maeve Sheehan