Mr. John McCarthy:

One can look at it in a number of ways. It was intended to be a broadly indicative figure, against the background of an understanding that this was going to be a fairly competitive process. I do not think suppliers would have entered into the process thinking it was a monetary territory in which they could take refuge. They would have known it would be a fairly competitive process. In general, we would tend to be cautious about what we put into the public domain in terms of very specific costs.

The Deputy asked why we have chosen the availability-based model of public-private partnership, PPP. This model requires the private partner to design, build, finance and operate for a period of time. One factor in this decision was the extent to which this model has the capacity to be off-balance sheet, expanding the ability to deliver without impacting the fiscal space - that awful term. It is also a model that the National Development Finance Agency has used with some success in other areas of public infrastructure. It has been tried and tested.