Ms Margaret Attridge:

We acknowledge that the timeline in some cases has been too long. As I said earlier, we are expanding our engineering services teams. Many of the queries are quite simple and the answer will be “Yes”, so we need to get those through the process as quickly as possible. We have a dedicated engineering services team that will deal with those. The more complex issues will take longer.

We have started to deliver some improvements. We currently have 87% of our pre-connection inquiries closed within the 16-week period. A lot of them are much shorter than 16 weeks and there is now a much faster turnaround time for pre-connection queries. With regard to the follow-on applications, 71% of those are closed within the 16-week period.

As of now, our refusal rate is at just 1.2% for the pre-connections and 0.4% for the connections. In most cases, the answer is “Yes-Yes”. It is just that when the applications are larger and more complex, there is not always a quick answer. We are looking for a solution to support the developments. We just have to consider all the options and that is what can take time with some of them.

We are resourcing up to turn around those applications more quickly.