Yes, we are in a sense talking very directly about contract evaluations.
I think the key is to ask a number of questions. One, is risk actually being transferred? There's a lot of skepticism about that in the literature. Two, at what cost is this risk being transferred? Three, could this risk transfer be achieved in other ways? For instance, could we not have a design-build system that would satisfy most of Mr. Joy's criteria without having to handle the operations, financing, and in some cases, ownership of infrastructure?
If we are going to evaluate contracts efficiently, we need to know how these risk numbers were arrived at. I think the private sector has an obligation, together with the governments that are proposing P3s, to show the public where these numbers came from and how they were calculated.
Finally, we have to understand that if we are cutting back the public sector systematically, as we have done for a number of years, this will affect the public sector's capacity to handle infrastructure, which I personally believe to be a front line service. We do have to look at the implications of what we're doing when it comes to the capacity of the public sector.