Mr. John Kelpie:

With regard to spatial planning, probably one of the largest pieces of work we originally did was working with Government to establish the Derry-Letterkenny cross-Border city region prominently in the national planning framework and the national development plan. Very importantly, as the fourth largest city region, the primary objective of the city region is to become a positive contributor to the economy on both sides of the Border. To do so, it is really important that it is strategically recognised as such so we are very pleased with the prominence the city region has been given in both those documents. We hope to use that prominence to advance many of the outcomes of the city region and deliver for both Governments on many of the objectives of the respective programmes for government so that is a very important piece of work for us.

We are looking at the whole spatial planning piece in the north west. Both planning departments are looking at infrastructure and physical development. We are beginning to look, not on a back-to-back basis as happened previously, but with a joint approach. We mentioned Brexit, which is the topic of the day. While the debate continues to rage, particularly in Westminster, as to what Brexit might look like at some point in the future, as the city region that will probably be most impacted by whatever type of Brexit emerges, we are already beginning to look at a post-Brexit landscape. What might the landscape of the north-west city region look like and what are those opportunities? We focused a great deal on the challenges in recent years but how might we move beyond this into a new era regardless of how Brexit falls in the coming months? We recently commissioned a very exciting piece of work with Harvard University in Massachusetts working in collaboration with the University of Ulster, Maynooth University and Letterkenny Institute of Technology to engage our communities to take that work forward. We are about half way through that and hope to finish that work in the next number of months. That is a really exciting opportunity for any city region to be undertaking not least one at this time.