Ms Orla Murphy:

I would be happy to elaborate. My intention is not to undermine the good work that is going on in lots of places in the country and with lots of different pilot strategies and different approaches that have been trialled over the past number of years. However, even hearing the volume of approaches that are being taken, some of which have been presented today, underlines and highlights the urgent need to bring it all together so that we are all talking about the same thing when we speak about vacancy.

We have a lot of data sets to avail of. The approach taken in Philadelphia involved layering those data sets so that we can combine them and ask of them different questions in order that we can understand what is partially vacant, what a short-term let is, what is a commercial property and what is residential vacancy, and can track this quite quickly over time. GeoDirectory is very powerful. The fact that we have postmen and postwomen on the ground who know their local area intimately can be combined into national data sets and updated quarterly. It is quite powerful as one tool. It gives us a very accurate national picture but that is irregular.

How do we bring that together? First, we need the will to recognise that this is useful and then we need a single national platform to do that. Understanding Scottish Places is an open platform data set that allows us to look at all of the information online and compare different towns and cities, not just to do with dereliction and vacancy but also to do with statistics that may be gathered in the census regarding commuting patterns, education facilities and the different types of homes we have so we can compare, contrast and track data. Unless we know what we have, it is very difficult to make plans for what we need to do. This must occur at a national level. Through advances in GIS systems and the various agencies collecting data, which have been highlighted in the Stokes O'Callaghan report in some detail, this can very easily be translated into a national data set but we must have the will to put that into action and resource it properly.

The partnership approach in Scotland emerged out of a recognised need to have a town centre first approach. This applied to rural towns but also to city districts. That was parsed at what that meant. The responsibility for it was put directly under a high-level department. It was not placed with a department of housing or a compartment of rural and community development but, in our case, placed under the Department of the Taoiseach because it is cross-cutting. It must cut across all policies and not be siloed into one or the other. Within that, there are links to the data sets we have but also to common tools and methodologies that we would use so that we are not trying to stick individual sticking plasters on different problems around the country but are co-ordinating that into one approach that can be adopted and adapted depending on the scale of the place with which we are working and allows us to see what is working where, how that can impact on different places and track it over time. The Heritage Council's collaborative town centre health check programme is excellent but is only happening in 15 towns and is pretty much led single-handedly by Alison Harvey with the support of collaborators in the towns. She has a long queue of other towns that want to be part of that programme but it is not yet a national programme. It cannot be because it does not have the resources to do so. There are similar tools in Scotland such as the Understanding Scottish Places audit tool and the Place Standard tool. These are commonly used and can be rolled out in any town, neighbourhood, community or city. Again, they are comparable and digitally linked so that the information gathered can be compared and the same tools and methodologies are used nationally.

There are quite simple tools. I acknowledge that it is a complex problem but vacancy and dereliction are symptomatic. Fixing vacancy and dereliction will not fix our urban places. It is a larger and more holistic problem that needs a national co-ordinated partnership approach that is not siloed into any Department or local authority but works from the high level all the way down to a bottom-up approach that is supportive, uses partnership, gathers all of the partners, agencies and local authorities together, and makes best use of our existing policy. We have a lot of policy that is really well written and has very admirable objectives but there is a blockage concerning how that translates into action on the ground. All of us see this in our daily lives as we move around cities and towns and can see that whole streets are still vacant. The principal street in our capital suffers hugely from vacancy and dereliction. This is something that any visitor to our country sees as his or her first port of call when he or she visits our country but it is also the case in many rural towns. It is also seen in towns with high levels of short-term lets that are not yet rent pressure zones. This is translating into an unsustainable future for those towns because they simply cannot sustain new populations coming to them. We will have a significant population increase so we must act with urgency on this and do it while reducing our carbon emissions by 7% every year so it is a massive challenge that needs national co-ordination and the resources behind that to deliver it.