Mr. Michael McNicholas:

It made absolutely no sense for us to stop the work that had been done or the public money that had been invested in designs and projects that were what we called "in flight". Regardless of whether some of those projects made sense, at least they were delivering improved services. The first thing we did was to maintain continuity of service. Nobody experienced any diminution in service during the transfer of services from 34 local authorities to a single utility on the operational side, and the front-line services. This is a credit to the local authority staff. We took hold of the capital works and rationalised them. It would have made no sense, however, and it would be scandalous for us to have stopped and thrown out work that was done. We have added significant new projects also. We do not know the mix of them but there were some in flight and some were at the early design stage. We took that over and added to that. This is the total commutative outcome to the end of 2016.