Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

I acknowledge that areas in Deputy Fitzmaurice's constituency and nearby were some of the worst affected. As he says, with forestry in the area in particular, there have been a number of power outages in those areas. Going back to the winter plan and our overall plan around resilience and the need for a statutory basis for forestry corridors, it is with those local communities in mind that we are making those recommendations.

On the Deputy's point about our resources, at the peak of the storm restoration effort, and it was concentrated in the north west, we had about 3,000 people deployed. We had 60 contracting organisations. We had 650 specialist people in from other jurisdictions to help us. These are maybe not the types of resources that the Deputy is talking about with diggers, but in general. It is important to recognise the response to be able to get that type of resource in such a short of period of time to help support our own people and that contractor base. A total of 60 contracting organisations supported us during the storm.

On the Deputy's overall point about local contractors versus national, ESB Networks over time has moved in general more towards the bigger contractors for some of the reasons that the Deputy talked about around the safety requirements, changes in legislation and training. We deploy those contractors to support us during the storm. I cannot particularly comment on specific local cases relating to offers of support but we tried to do everything we could to deploy as many resources as possible to get customers back as quickly as we could.