Mr. Tony Smyth:

We tried to deliver some of them through local authorities in the hope that we could leverage their resources, but we found that many detailed technical questions were coming back to our staff anyway. We were brought in to work more closely with council staff. They were managing the overall contract, but because many technical questions were coming back to us, we did not have the benefit of the arm's length management that we had hoped would arise through handing the projects over to local authorities. When we came to the national programme, this is why we decided to contract the service providers directly rather than through local authorities.