Further to the answer to question S1W-22086 by Ross Finnie on 4 February 2002, whether the relative weightings chosen by West of Scotland W…

This is a matter for West of Scotland Water. The Chief Executive's response is:Each discipline was asked to score options against their criteria to assist in summarising the information in the Environmental Statement. Each discipline adopted its own scoring approach and a variety of different ranges and scoring methods were used, although for all criteria a low score represented worse and a high score better performance. So for example the environmental team scored all options on a range of 1 (worst) to 10 (best) for all environmental criteria; the different engineering disciplines used ranges e.g. 0-2, 0-5, 1-5, depending on the criterion and the degree of differentiation between the options. For energy consumption the quantitative values were simply converted to a scale of 1 to 10 from worst to best. It should be emphasised that the scores for different criteria are not equivalent and cannot be summed together. The scoring ranges are indicated on the appraisal framework in Table D6.2 of Appendix D in the Environmental Statement.It is worth stressing that throughout the complex decision making process, final choices were made by discussion and debate between different disciplines in the team. Consequently distortions related to importance did not occur. Tools were used to help the team sort out their ideas and distil information down into a manageable form to help their discussions, but they were not the principal methods used to make choices.