Mr. David Moloney:

We have used the NDFA to provide professional advice of various kinds, around public-private partnerships, PPPs, in particular in recent years, financial advice around that. Of course, we use NewERA within the NTMA to provide professional shareholder advice in relation to the commercial semi-States. That is the kind of model that we are going to try to establish. There is a sense that very large, capital-heavy Departments have a size that enables them to bring the correct expertise to develop the project management and the specific expertise. However, smaller Departments which do not have as much exposure to repeated capital projects need a central source of advice within Government and that would build up experience of actually delivering that type of public capital projects. That in effect is what we are going to be developing within the NDP. The concept is very clear because we already have that in respect of PPPs and shareholder management in the commercial State sector. We are going to try to apply that to the delivery of capital by those Departments that are not as capital-heavy as others.

Precisely what that breaks down at will in some ways depend on what Departments identify themselves as needing. However, the areas we have identified there are the most obvious ones, such as project management, specific engineering and CS. These are things that will, for example, help in cost estimates at different stages of the project cycle.