Ms Bridget Carroll:

As we are not accountants, we confined ourselves to making a recommendation. This is an issue for co-operatives and it also came up in research we were doing. We do not propose to get into the criteria except to say that some of the criteria mentioned by ICOS seem very sensible. What we were alluding to in our recommendation is that this provision already exists, although not willy-nilly for everybody.

It applies in specific circumstances. I suppose that is what we could look at in terms of a level playing pitch.