Mr. Ronnie Downes:

That is a good question. When we upgraded the public spending code in late 2019, one of the issues that we looked at was the proper time horizon to discount out costs and benefits into the future. We extended the overall time horizon to capture benefits to 20 years and in some cases 25 years. This is something we are looking at in the context of the ongoing revision of the public spending code. A case could also be made for potentially even longer time horizons in the context of intergenerational environmental and transformational projects to come up with a longer time period for those costs and benefits to be discounted but incorporated into that frame of reference. When it comes to applying those frameworks then on issues like social housing, the 20-year to 25-year horizons are the timeframes that we have in mind.