Ms Martina Maloney:

I will deal with the Deputy's questions on data quality issues. I have a certain sympathy for local authorities, which can be working on archaic systems at times. As the Deputy has identified, the provision of data that are accurate and timely is very important to us. We have put in place a system over the past four years that is now working quite well. I am much more confident in regard to the quality of the data we are getting in for the performance indicators. It has been a journey for us. The way we approach it is that, every year, we issue guidelines to the local authorities regarding how to calculate the particular indicators we are looking for. If we have any queries in regard to interpretation, the secretariat deals with them. We also do a random audit of different local authorities in regard to data gathering. We select a number of indicators each year and we go to six local authorities to go through the indicators with them to make sure the processes underpinning them are accurate and to verify the data we are getting is accurate. That has certainly been very beneficial for us in improving the quality of the data.

The issue with the housing data in the 2016 report arose because of the changes associated with the implementation of Rebuilding Ireland, changing requirements and changing definitions. That is why, when we tried to balance the figures independently against departmental figures, some issues were thrown up for us regarding what category each aspect was in. It took us a year to resolve that but we are now very satisfied with the robust system we have in place for the gathering of housing data and, hence, they were published in the 2017 report.