Ms Bernie McNally:

On the point about transitioning, our operations team is looking at how we transition from the existing schemes to the new affordable child care scheme.

That is very much part of the project plan and a huge amount of attention will be given to that issue. We have already started that journey. We will have national roadshows. We had eight roadshows last year on the September measures, so there will be huge communication with providers and parents several months in advance to prepare them for that transition. I would reiterate what the Minister has just said, that this scheme is going to deal with a range of different family needs and so forth. In terms of the 1,000 pages to which the Minister referred, there are very detailed functional specifications set out to assist the tender, identify and give us exactly what we need. A huge amount of work has been done on that to make sure that there is no creep and that the developer knows exactly what is required. The advice was that we could have looked at the Pobal framework, the Office of Government Procurement, OGP, framework or the open tender option. The latter was deemed to be the best in terms of giving us the most robust procurement. The Minister has set out the timeframes already. The May timeframe to which the Minister refers is indicative purely for the request for tender, RFT. The project board, that is the governance structure over the affordable child care scheme, ACS, would say that it does not want to confirm a timeframe as of yet because good practice is to wait, as the Minister said, until the vendor is in place and has had an opportunity to look at everything and determine that it is realistic and reasonable.