Mr. John McCarthy:

In response to the first question, I can certainly understand the frustrations of the public generally in terms of its wish to have services delivered in an efficient way that delivers for local communities. I absolutely understand that. With regard to the move from the old general purpose grants to the LPT, the policy position adopted was that no local authority should end up being worse off in the transition. The approach taken in order to achieve that was that each local authority would retain 80% of the LPT collected in its area locally and the balance of 20% would be used in order to achieve that equalisation function to ensure that no local authority would be worse off. What that has meant is that some local authorities made the transition on an equal basis. They lost nothing and gained nothing. There were a number of local authorities, from memory it may have been nine or ten, that had strong LPT bases and made significant gains in income. The policy position that-----