Ms Yvonne Harris:

As Mr. Gleeson has said, the pre-connection inquiry is usually a pre-planning process. It is typically a desktop process, so the developer, the customer, will come and ask us if it is feasible to build on a site and do we have water and wastewater. There are typically very long delays between the pre-connection inquiry and the connection application, and many pre-connection inquiries never result in a connection application. While the pre-connection inquiry is an important process, particularly for feasibility, there are certainly considerations around maybe putting time limits on them. When a developer comes and gets a positive response from a pre-connection inquiry, they might not come back to us for maybe four years, at which point the capacity may have changed due to other housing or a large commercial customer. So the pre-connection inquiry and the connection application is, as the Senator says, largely a matter of timing. Then we would have multiple pre-connection inquiries for single sites, so only one will transpire.