Mr. Alex Chisholm:

It varies a certain amount from year to year according to the projects we undertake. There are two main brackets within the technical advice. One is consultancy and the other is outsourcing.

I will give some examples under each heading to help the Deputy understand the make-up of it.

From the consultancy point of view, the most typical scenario would be where we buy in very specialised economic consultancy and sometimes engineering and other technical consultancies. In the case of a project like the multi-band spectrum auction, for example, the types of skills necessary to design that auction, such as the very high-level economics and very sophisticated software coding required, are held by perhaps six firms in the world, We needed those with expertise to advise us on how to get it exactly right. That particular project proved very successful. It would not be economic for us to employ those types of people ourselves. In fact, it is more efficient to secure the required skills on a consultancy basis. Having said that, we did a huge amount of work ourselves in managing that process, with our own economists, lawyers and spectrum engineers all working on the project. There was, however, still a need to buy in some element of specialised advice. It is the most economic way to proceed.

In the case of outscourcing, the services we have tended to outsource are those which are more efficiently done externally. We have, for instance, outsourced certain types of information technology work, our payroll function and our customer care function. Another outsourced function is the so-called drive test, where technicians go around with specialised equipment monitoring the strength of mobile telephone signals up and down the country. We always take the view that we can either do it ourselves or do it externally and what determines which side of the frontier we are on is primarily a value-for-money consideration. The only exception to that is where certain types of work are actually required to be done externally. In the case of quality-of-service measures, for example, which apply in regard to both electronic communications and post, it is a requirement of the legislation that they are done by an independent body. That is a case of compulsory outsourcing.