251. Can you guarantee you will not come back and say, we cannot meet our obligations in the pension fund?
(Ms Lomax) I cannot give you any guarantee of that sort, nobody ever can.
Mr Howarth
252. Can I make a brief point, it seems to me the reason we have probably spent the last half hour or more of this extended meeting of the Committee is that when the Department, presumably the Permanent Secretary, signed off the NAO's Report they were accepting the integrity of the comparison that the NAO were making. I think it would have been better if you had doubts about that to have taken that up at the time, it might have saved a lot of difficulty here today and us getting into a lot of territory that has become baffling to many of us.
(Ms Lomax) I fully accept that and I apologise to the Committee. I think I got dragged into it as a result of trying to justify the amount of stress testing that had been done. I think it is a highly complicated and technical area. If I have confused the Committee I will try and put it right when I send a further note.
Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms Lomax and Mr Everitt, for coming to see us. We will obviously return to this in our report. As you might imagine, we may have a lot to say about whether the way this PPP was handled put the company into financial distress. Before I end I am indebted to Mr Geraint Davies for a quote from Adam Smith who wrote this a long time ago: "The tolls for the maintenance of the high road cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons because they might neglect altogether the repair of the road and yet continue to levy very nearly the same tolls." Let's hope we can learn from the wisdom of the past. Thank you very much.