Mr. Fergal O'Leary:

It is widespread, that has been the case for a number of years, and we must acknowledge that. For us, as I mentioned in our statement, the difference is whether the price differentials are bigger than they were before. Is it the case that firms are using information to test consumer groups to see if they can pull more margin out of those consumer groups? What we want to do with this piece of research, which is broadly similar to what our counterpart in the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority did, is to see how much the loyalty penalty is in the 16 markets that we are going to look at. What we will do then is try to target the customers who are losing out at the moment, see what groups are there, and then we will look at solutions. Traditionally, the solutions we have looked at have been public awareness and trying to get consumers to switch. We are very well aware that not all consumers have access to online information, so a lot of our work, including sponsoring a television programme, is to try to get to people who do not have access to the Internet. However, there is a genuine question, which is the reason we are doing this research at the moment, namely, to see if that is enough. Without pre-empting the work that we will do over the next three or four months, I think we have come to a stage where it is unlikely to be enough to make sure that competition can remain in markets, that new entrants can come in and look for customers, but people should not be penalised for being on long legacy products or the differentials should not be as large as I think we are seeing in some sectors.