Mr. John Barry:

The point the Deputy made is very relevant. We have inherited a relatively ad hocsystem of asset management through no fault of the people involved but that is the way the structure of the industry was. We have now centralised that in one central system. Asset management systems are data hungry. They require an awful lot of data. As that data are gathered and fed in, that allows the asset managers to make informed decisions about where to direct the capital investment and where to direct their maintenance programmes. As Mr. John Tierney said, we launched the asset management system in mid-2013 to facilitate the metering programme and on 1 January we went live with the upgraded version of that, which was always part of the scope. We now have a functioning asset management system. I can give the Deputy a tangible example of that. When the operatives are installing meters the work orders to the individual houses where the meters are to be located are despatched remotely. They have a mobile device in their van and are notified of the jobs through their mobile device; they dig the hole, put in the meter and record what they find such as for example, lead pipes or leaks, and upload that data and that goes back into our central system. Equally, the completion of those jobs are recorded and they go through to our customer service centre. If a customer wants to know when a hole will be filled or whatever, the people in the contact centre have instant information on it. That is a tangible example of what these systems will involve.
Deputy Coffey queried the issue of reinvestment. Obviously we have made a very significant investment in the past 12 months and there will be continuous upgrades as the technology improves as we move forward but for us to invest we will require regulatory approval. We would have to go to the regulator if we want to invest more in these systems in years to come and seek approval for him to sanction that spend, be it upgrades or complete reinvestments in new systems. The Deputy can be assured that any money that is spent post this investment will be subject to absolute regulatory approval. From my experience in the gas business, there were many instances when we refused approval for the spending of money. We would have to make a strong business case for the spending of such money and there would always be a business case to support such investment.