Mr. John McCarthy:

From memory and with the assistance of my colleague, I note that exercise built on the report referred to above it, namely the local authority tenant satisfaction survey, which was carried out first to get a perspective from the customer's point of view. It actually yielded positive results in terms of local authority tenants and the extent to which they felt the local authority was managing their accommodation properly. On the review of the management and maintenance of local authority housing, more specifically, the purpose of the report was to identify best practice and roll it out across the local authority housing system. We were particularly concerned about the extent to which there was a need to intervene with central government funding to bring long-standing vacant properties back into use. This is now designed to be a platform which we will need to take forward to ensure that ongoing planned management and maintenance by local authorities gets us to a point where we should not really need to provide significant capital funding. In effect, the stock and the assets should not deteriorate in the way they have previously.