Dr. Matt Yardley:

In summary, we are.

As the Chair can imagine, there is a significant amount beneath that. As I set out in my opening statement, understanding the nature of the costs in this kind of operation is complex. Probably the first piece of work we did, back in 2015-16, was to use an existing and incredibly detailed cost model which was developed to understand the possible costs of delivering this network. I can talk the committee through more of that detail if necessary. As we went through the process, we learned a lot from interacting with the three bidders that were in the running at that time. When the number of bidders went down to two, we started to improve and refine the assumptions in our cost model. The initial cost of deploying the network turned out to be very similar to our original estimates, that is, the cost to build the network. We were confident that the cost model in terms of homes passed and to cover all of the intervention area was very well behaved and came in very close to the detailed costed solutions put forward by the two bidders. That gave us some confidence that the model was sound and robust. Those are the key opening comments on the cost. I am happy to go through more of the detail behind that if the committee would find that useful.