Ms Orla Hegarty:

I have a couple of points. First, the issue of cost has been coming up. I am picking up that it is perceived that local authority building control would be a cost barrier or a cost to the State. The Northern Ireland model of building control is actually cheaper for owners and they have a rigorous regime. Everything is inspected. Whether one is taking down a wall in one's house, converting one's attic or building a porch, one may pay a couple of hundred euro for one inspection that gives some reassurance about that, but if one is building a new house it is considerably cheaper than our system would be under the assigned certifier inspections. That is quite responsive. People come out within a couple of days when they are called for state inspections. There is a model that is virtually self-funding, paid for by owners and developers, in the North that could be looked at.

As for off-site construction, there is a lot of confusion about this because what we think of as traditional construction in housing is normally concrete-block based and where we are probably going in the future is towards more system building. There is a lot of debate around this and it comes back to the issue of the asset value, and the protection of people as well. The building regulations protect people long enough to escape from buildings. They do not protect the building from burning down. One is dealing with different issues here. The other problem has been that although system building has come in and obviously will become more common because it is cheaper, there have been a lot of half measures of putting elements together on-site, that is, putting together timber party walls or construction that can fail easily with somebody, for instance, a neighbour, putting up a shelf or drilling a hole in the wall next door. It is a policy decision as to whether that is acceptable because it only really happens in housing. We do not see it in other building types. It is to do with saving money at the construction stage but one would have to question the long-term durability and investment in that and the risk for people on the site.

Finally, on the issue of decennial insurance, which is a ten-year policy, France is under a different legal regime but there also are project insurance policies available in the UK that are becoming more common and even those who are building office buildings would be looking at that type of policy. The advantage for the owner is he or she has one point of contact and if there is anything wrong, the owner goes there. If they want to sue somebody down the line or follow up with other policies or other insurances, that is not the owner's problem as a consumer. They can do that in the background over time but the owner gets the problem sorted out immediately.