Mr. Paul McGowan:

I was going to come back to that issue. We would not expect a situation where Irish Water would charge people for a service it does not deliver. That is the first point. We will have to come back to the Deputy on the second point, which was the adoption of schemes. One can understand that there may be an issue whereby schemes have been put in place where, perhaps, there are concerns over the quality of the pipework and there is potential liability for rectifying inferior quality pipework. One can understand that is an issue because in a socialised tariff, all that cost is borne by all customers when in fact it may be appropriate that the developer or somebody else would be forced to address that particular issue. I will not give a definitive answer on that question until we have investigated it a little further.

The Deputy mentioned the SLAs and costs. We have not taken the costs under the SLAs and said that is fine, that is what Irish Water will get. However, we have analysed Irish Water's costs - this will be in our publication - to determine the efficient level of costs. We have to recognise from where Irish Water is starting. All new utilities, where they have been established on the back of an existing local authority provision or an existing provision by some other means, have taken on board a particular cost structure, a particular set of circumstances. The role of the economic regulator has been to state the utility's starting point, where it wants to get to, what is its glide path and what are the efficiencies we think it can achieve. That is what we are looking at. We are not looking at the SLAs and saying Irish Water has got those costs and that is it. We are looking at its cost base and identifying what efficiencies we think it should make. We expect Irish Water to achieve those efficiencies. As stated previously, we note that there is a review under the SLAs after years two and seven. That is the point where Irish Water needs to engage in terms of how those SLAs are structured, but we are not just taking SLAs and saying that those costs have to pass through to the Irish Water customer. We are looking at these costs independently against the types of costs that have been incurred for similar services in other jurisdictions and by other water companies.