Ms Cathy Mannion:

There are two aspects to the compliance rate. All businesses have a certain level of bad debts. We had to factor a level of bad debts into the calculations. In addition, as Irish Water did not have a perfect database of who everybody was and where everybody lived, we had to make allowances for names not being on the database or people having moved elsewhere. We examined a number of figures and, from memory - I will revert to the committee if I am incorrect - we used a figure of 80% in the model. That does not mean that we expect 20% not to pay, rather it was intended to cover the other two assumptions I mentioned.