Mr. Paul Quinn:

The option was available within the contract for the parties not to proceed with the costs and that was a decision made by the Government at the time. As the Secretary General said, the use of two-stage projects can arise for various reasons. In that case, meeting the timeline was an enormous contributor to the use of the two-stage arrangement. There may be other situations. For example, if works are being done at an historic site, the use of a two-stage contract would be absolutely necessary in circumstances where one may not be in a position to foresee what might be under the ground when digging starts on an historic site. There may be cases where there is a need to run two-stage processes because one may not always have the time to do a specific set of preliminary works, pause while a tender is run and then proceed with a second tender.