Ms Vivienne Jupp:

The first point to make is that we always benchmark ourselves against international best practice in the areas in respect of which we can do so. We also try to learn from best practice elsewhere. There are international bodies which do this. We contribute to them and receive information back. This helps us to look at the services we provide and ensure that we operate them in the best possible way. There are certain services which are consolidated within the group itself and which are not replicated in the individual companies. That enables us to achieve some economies of scale across those services and to attract the skills that are required to operate those once rather than in three individual companies. The thing we need to do an awful lot more of is look at the processes and procedures the individual companies - which would be doing similar things - use to run their businesses and determine the services they operate in order to discover whether these are delivering the best outcomes and establish whether we can do anything from a process re-engineering perspective to deliver better services in a more competitive way. No matter what we have in terms of the money we receive from the PSO, the NTA, as the regulator, should always be demanding improved efficiencies and effectiveness from the organisations every year. We would always need to do that and we must make a much better effort in this regard.