Mr. Paul Lemass:

One would have go to back as far as 2000 to look at when we started allocating general purpose grants. The approach that was taken at that time was to develop what was called a needs and resources model. That model ran from 2000 to 2008 and brought in up to 600 financial entries into a modelling system that looked at things like the number of housing applications, motor tax transactions, rates demands, the kilometres of local and regional roads funded by local authority resources, the number of swimming pools and opening hours. It became a very complex model but it did establish for eight years what the general purpose grant should be. From 2008 onwards, that was effectively kept as the baseline. The model ran from 2000 to 2008, but thereafter it became the baseline until 2014, at which time it transitioned into the LPT allocation.