Mr. T.J. Malone:

Yes. We issue a bill of quantities for an area once the low-level design is completed. We deliver that to the contractor's yard.

The Deputy spoke about local authorities. Significant progress has been made and we appreciate all the help and support we have received from this committee and local authorities. We have made significant progress in the past 12 months. Mr. Hendrick mentioned this earlier. We spent 12 months getting this agreement in place under section 254 on the poles.

It took us longer than we would have expected, but we got it in and the Minister launched it on 5 May. We had probably secured enough licences for approximately 15,000 premises by May 2021. As of today, we have enough licences for the poles for approximately 135,000 premises. Some local authorities move faster than others and construction of some of those will start later in the year and will not be delivered until 2023. However, for what we would expect to be delivered this year, out of the 40-odd deployment areas, all bar five are secured for this year and we believe we will get the other five within the next four or five weeks.

We are well advanced from that point where we are working and have worked very hard with them. A steering committee has been set up that involves us, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, the Local Government Management Agency, LGMA, and the County and City Management Association, CCMA, and we meet regularly to check whether there are any blockages.

One area on which we need to improve, when we hit a snag on the ground from a road-opening licence point of view, is that we need to have the ability to turn them around faster. When we get a low-level design, we can predict where we are going. We put in forward-planner local authority road-opening licences at that point. The issue, some of which the committee will have seen on site, is when we come across an issue on site that had not been predicted at the time of applying for the initial licence. We need to speed that up because some of those licences can take anything between four and 12 weeks to turn around, depending on the local authorities. That is where the predictability of the numbers comes in.