Ms Sarah Neary:

A wide range of questions have been asked and, hopefully, I will cover them all in my response. I will reply to the questions in no particular order. On the CIRI, it is at an advanced stage of drafting and we are working with the Attorney General's office on some specific issues to bring forward the heads of a Bill. First, it will be circulated on the eCabinet system to the Departments and we hope to do that in the next few weeks. It will then go to the Government for approval to proceed to pre-legislative scrutiny, at which time we probably will return to this committee to have a more in-depth conversation on it. Its aim is to provide consumer protection whereby anybody on the register would be competent and compliant and anybody carrying out works under the Building Control Act would have to be a CIRI registered builder. I will leave my comments on CIRI at that.

On inspections and the question regarding staff, we show on our website a list of building control officers and a point of contact. There are about 70 points of contract for the 31 local authorities and the total number of people working in the building control area across the country is 332. Those are the statistics from 2015. The breakdown of that figure of 332 is 37 technicians, 111 administrative staff and 185 fire officers, engineers or building surveyors. It works out at approximately 177 whole-time equivalents because the staff have other functions in the area of planning, fire control or housing. It is up to each local authority and manager as to how they distribute that work.

The embargo on recruitment was only lifted in the local authorities in 2015. There were slightly more than 111 approvals for sanction from this Department to employ people in local authorities and in that respect, 657 were housing related. That indicates where the activity lies.