Dr. Cathal FitzGerald:

I will first respond to the point made about regeneration and then the point about expertise. With transport-orientated development, there is a tendency to see all of these locations as being large-scale or massive sites like former military air sites, etc. They have regeneration at their core and they have done since the concept was developed in the 1900s with the idea of garden cities. Montpellier provides us with a good example of regeneration that was planned in terms of layout, routes, safety and lighting. These things have recently become most important. The amenities are built to serve the community. This is a mixed use brownfield site that includes colleges and industrial sites. By having the vision, decision and a dedicated institution they were able to take a 36 ha site that was run down with factories and turn it into mixed living, offices, regional government headquarters and create a swimming pool, etc. There are 50% private market homes and 50% social and affordable homes. There is a tendency to think of these large-scale sites as being a blank canvas and a greenfield site somewhere on the outskirts of a town but we should not look beyond the regeneration capacity of transport-orientated development. We should not lose sight of the fact that the Land Development Agency, LDA, was established as a regeneration agency as well as a development agency.

In our NESC report of November 2020 on housing actions, we spoke about expertise within local authorities and the need for specialist teams, possibly within the LDA, to support local authorities that must engage on an irregular basis on massive planning or compulsory purchase order, CPO, which means that the expertise at senior levels is not there. So why do we not have teams that can master plan a CPO, who are specialists in it and are available to local authorities to undertake that work?