Ms Alison Harvey:

Yes, I will add a few points. We need a data driven system. We have to examine that. The OECD has made recommendations in an interesting report in 2019 on a data-driven public sector and the pathway to a data-driven public sector in Ireland. That is very important. Ms Teehan and I have stressed that the programme we have set up is data driven and that creates public value in itself. It also leads to the democratisation of data, which is also important.

I wish to highlight the upper floors of the town centres. The vacancy levels we are looking at are 80% plus. The vacancy rates I gave the committee related to commercial, ground-floor retail. There is a lot of potential there. The problem is we do not have the data and we do not know the buildings' condition, so we need to get stuck into that if we are going to reuse and target our town centres. In addition, we would need a national enabling policy to free up how we do infill, try to pay to do up the traditional front of the building and deal with the conservation deficit in the financial model.