Ms Sarah Neary:

Labour and materials are market costs and any changes to those affect the cost of construction. The negotiations on trade tariffs or labour movement in respect of the common travel area are absolutely critical. In terms of the Department's role the key area is to make sure that we are helpful in the process by explaining the rules to any organisation that wants to establish itself as a notified body, whether it is a transfer from the UK or a new body, and to make sure we are clear and open about our notification procedures. That is what we have done. We have published all our notification procedures. Any queries are dealt with promptly and we work very closely with the National Standards Authority of Ireland, NSAI, the Irish National Accreditation Board, INAB, and the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation on that. We know that they are ramping up the delivery of their services, which is an integral part of that notification procedure. We are making our industry stakeholders as aware of whatever is developing as much as we can, and disseminating any of the information we get from Brussels to our key stakeholders. The main one was that the EU said the rules will not change the construction products regulation, CPR, which applies post-Brexit in the same way. We are disseminating as much clarity as we can so that people know what to prepare for.

We are going to have to deal with whatever effect Brexit has on cost or labour. Construction cost is one element of delivering housing, but land, financing, professional fees, levies, all make up the entire cost of delivering. We are doing several things on those factors, such as the compact growth in Dublin city and other large urban areas that Mr. Hogan spoke about. We revised the planning guidelines for apartments earlier this year. They improved the economics of apartment building and we are seeing an increase in planning permissions and delivery on that front. Several measures on affordability are being brought forward, the serviced sites fund, which also complements the delivery of affordability, the help to buy schemes and the Rebuilding Ireland home loan all support bringing down costs are part of an effort to reduce the overall delivery costs. The Land Development Agency and the strategic management of land and the State portfolio, and the Home Building Finance Ireland initiative as well are part of an effort to reduce the overall delivery costs. We are doing what we can for the broad delivery issues.