Mr. Jim Breslin:

I will come to that. That process of research informed the design brief, against which the hospital will be built. The Senator asked when the contracts were signed. The briefing note given to last week's meeting references the main contracts signing dates. The contract with the main contractor and the two specialist contractors was signed on 3 August 2017. As we said earlier, the instruction of the phase B works took place on 8 January 2019.

The Senator asked why it took so long to finalise the detail. It took so long because it is a very technical process to get to a final design. The option that existed was not to go to the market but to wait for all of that work to be done, which could have taken two years. We would then be pricing things at a higher level, when we could have gone with our outline design. That is what the technical exercise of getting down to the very nitty-gritty detail of every room and every piece of plant takes. The choice was to do an outline design, to go the market and get pricing against that and then to remeasure it, based on the detailed design or else to hold off for two years and go in one go. That will obviously be examined now but that was a strategic choice made by the development board. The board decided that it was better to get into the market and get the prices locked down at 2016 levels.

The Senator asked a question about the second bidder. It is important to say that if the second bidder for the main contract had been selected, which was not the lowest bidder, we would still have had the process for selecting the mechanical and electrical elements. We would have had to look at those competitions as well. The lowest bidders were accepted for all three elements. The main contract was awarded to BAM and the mechanical and electrical contracts were awarded separately. Then they were brought together as part of the whole construction programme.