Ms Anne Graham:

Of course, we would always seek additional funding. If you are delivering services and you know there are gaps in them, there is always a requirement for additional funding. We can use additional funding across service delivery and infrastructure, but what would assist us greatly, and it is not something that is in place, because we go through an annual cycle of PSO funding and it goes through the budget every year, this means we have to stop-start in terms of planning. By the time we know what our budget is going to be and plan for delivery, it can be the second quarter of the following year before we are beginning to deliver. What would be helpful for us, therefore, as an authority would be some foresight of what the funding could be over a horizon of a few years because this would allow for much more efficient planning and delivery.

However, that is challenging with the current budgetary structure.