Mr. Tom Costello:

On the first question, we should be mindful of the fact that we are operating in a hugely inflationary time, having come from the recession through to the period of 2012 and 2013 and the decade after that, as I mentioned earlier. It is likely that building costs will have increased by up to 100%. We set out on a journey. We had a deliberate approach in how we structured the project.

The two-stage tender process was internationally regarded as the best approach, whereby one goes to the market with a preliminary design and every element of the project identified but the quantities not finalised. We went through the process and I earlier went through the advantages of going this route. These are advantages which have accrued now and will in the future so that we are now at a stage whereby, through that process, we now have firm price and programme certainty.

I mentioned there were two issues in terms of lessons learned around seeking to get cost reductions when there was a competitive tender process. In hindsight, there was pressure on the budget, mainly driven by tender price inflation, and pressure to reduce the costs. People must remember that it is a huge project. It is one of the most expensive hospitals in the world but it is also one of the biggest children's hospitals in the world. It is important to remember that and because it is big, it is extraordinarily complex. People might walk into a room and say a room is a room but the infrastructure behind the delivery of that room to deliver a fully digital hospital is absolutely enormous. At the early stage of the design, the complexity of those services and the quantities involved were not fully recognised within the early stage tender. That became clear as the design developed over 2018.

It is important to remember that the quantities that are now applied to the rates we got in 2016 are the quantities that are required to deliver the project.