Mr. Damien McCallion:

A dedicated team is working on the project. We are focusing on two key issues. We are working to stabilise the programme because one must have a stable programme in order to move to a new test. One cannot jump from the current scenario to the new testing regime.

In terms of the tender, we ran our pre-tender market engagement before Christmas which invites the market to look at what is available. We have used a process of competitive dialogue which will allow us to engage with those interested in providing the service. There is a risk that if we went to tender in the current environment people may not bid.

We could end up having run a procurement process with no one to work with us. We believe the competitive dialogue process will allow us to secure a partner to work with us. The advertisement for the next stage of that, the EU tender, will be placed in the next few weeks.

We are moving along all the other elements we can, such as the training and education materials, communications and IT system changes that need to be made to go live. The team working on this have either visited or had conference calls with the people who have gone live on this in Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Wales. They have also discussed it with people in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland who are in the middle of their implementation processes. Most of those are planned to go live in the coming years.

As I mentioned, the critical path on HPV testing going live is when we run the tender to see how long the partner will take to establish and link into our system. At that point, we will have greater stability on a date for the programme for HPV testing going live.