Ms Yvonne Harris:

Over the past 18 months we have resourced and looked at building efficiencies into the process. We have taken out one-off housing - one-off housing goes through very quickly - and we have resourced our teams to ensure that we meet our key performance indicator. Our key performance indicator that we publish is 16 weeks but, actually, we measure ourselves against a ten-week turnaround. For pre-connection inquiries we process 85% in ten weeks, and for connection applications we process 75% in ten weeks. As was discussed earlier, those exceptional items outside the 85% and 75% absolutely take longer, and the intention is that we come up with a positive response. We have to get into a much more detailed process for the exceptional items and the applications or the pre-connection inquiries where we do not have all the data available to us, but we also measure the ones that fall outside this set 10% criteria.