Mr. Mark Synnott:

I am happy to address that. When we initially allowed customers to pay for their NCT appointment online, we took the fee at the point of the test. What we saw happening pretty much every day and in every test centre was that customers showed up for their test, thought they had already paid and did not have sufficient funds on their card to make the payment. That caused considerable embarrassment for the customer and the staff member who had to deal with it. As it was a repeated issue in the centres, we took the decision to say that if people believe they have paid when making the booking, let us take the payment at that point as well.