Q61 Chair: We the taxpayers paid them for time spent.
Q62 Ian Swales: Was a price agreed up front for the work? Would it typically be agreed up front? Did we agree to pay them £2.8 million for that piece of work? I think that is what the number is. Would we have said, "Right, we want you to do this work, and it will be £2.8 million," or would that figure have accrued over time? I am looking at the detailed table of adviser costs that was sent to us.
Graham Dalton: Kellogg, Brown and Root: the study was done between 2000 and 2002, it was not paid by the Highways Agency, we were not part of it-
Q63 Chair: It was paid by the Government.
Graham Dalton: But it is not in that table of charges.
Q64 Ian Swales: Oh, this is different work, then.
Q65 Jackie Doyle-Price: What did they do for the money that is in this table?
Ginny Clarke: This was the subsequent modelling that was done for the detailed design of the widening schemes. It was a separate contract. It was a contract with us, and, if you look at the time frame, it was done later. What they did was support the design that we did, which went into the contract and tender documents. They did the detailed traffic modeling associated with the widening schemes.
Q66 Joseph Johnson: I do not think the Chair has had an answer to the thrust of her question, which was whether you had any control over the speed with which they undertook the work, in the form of the contract that they were given.
Martin Capstick: This is what I think would have happened-I don't have the detail. Typically, for a contract like this, the Government would set out a brief and identify the key tasks that needed to be done. We would invite bids for it, and people would bid against that and indicate their costs. Clearly, over a project of this length, there would be milestones and payments related to milestones. The task involved a degree of analysis, consultation, and working with other transport operators and local authorities, so the timing of the project would have been agreed as it went along, particularly to allow time for work to be done and then discussions to be held.
Q67 Joseph Johnson: And did it conform to the time milestones that you are talking about?
Martin Capstick: I believe so, but I am afraid that I don't have the records of every project, to reassure you.
Q68 Joseph Johnson: You surely know that this is a hearing on the M25 report. Do we not know whether they kept to their timetable?
Graham Dalton: This was a study that was done before the project that we're talking about actually commenced. It was one of 22 multi-modal studies that were going on right around the country at about that time, and that was a typical duration, because they had taken their time-
Q69 Joseph Johnson: So it's a reasonable length of time for a report like this, in your view?
Graham Dalton: For that sort of thing-yes.
Q70 Chair: Two years?
Martin Capstick: If it helps, many of the multi-modal studies were reporting around the same time, which led to a range of Highways Agency schemes being added to the road programme round about 2004.