Dr. Donal McManus:

Not as directly as that but we have had meetings with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. We have received information since that. As Mr. Dunne said, we have done much work but we do not have a platform to share it on. It is like déjà vu. We are speaking about this issue again 18 months after we had this initial discussion in March 2018. We would like to share the point to where we think matters could progress.

On regulation, we had initially mentioned that one of the issues with regulation was control. If a regulator was controlling the sector that would have an impact on the classification. The regulation Bill will be produced soon so we will see what happens with that. The problem about contracts was one the points we made. Any regulator should not be able to control housing bodies because in Britain they are seeing as controlling the sector from a public point of view.

That is the number of meetings we have had. We have done quite a bit of work but the difficulty is in trying to follow up on that and to have an engagement. It is difficult to have an engagement on that at a distance. As Mr. Dunne said, matters have moved on in the last 18 months. It is on the agenda for a lot of the housing bodies. We still need to classify what will happen. It is taking up headspace for many housing bodies both in the process and for new bodies as well, such as the tier 2 and the tier 1 approved housing bodies. They will also have to think about it. We are just trying to have dialogue with them on that since we have come up with the information.