Mr. David Walsh:

On future population and demand requirements for land, the big benefit of having a new national planning framework to replace the national spatial strategy, NSS, is that there is a clear, evidence-based and sequential approach to where we estimate the growth demand will be. We know that over the next 25 years, between 800,000 and 1 million people will need to be housed and located on the island. The question is where should they be and whether we have the land, associated infrastructure and services to back it up. As the Secretary General stated, too much land was being developed with no real connection back to urban centres. As part of the national planning framework, which will look very nationally and at a quite a high level, there will be regional spatial economic strategies that will flow from that and on which work has already begun. The same data will be used to sweat it down across the three new regions. The next step is for each county to reflect and ask what the likely growth will be. There will be six-year development plans and the norm to safely have enough land to allow for flexibility where some development may not happen for different reasons is to have between 12 and 15 years of land supply. That would be a minimum requirement as part of any development plan, that a local authority can say that they can manage and deliver the next 15 years, assuming some of it may not happen over that period. The NPF will set the national benchmark for that.