Ms Lisa Clifford:

As I mentioned earlier, we have just come out of a series of meetings with local authorities looking at all of their URDF projects and getting a sense of where they are. The overriding message is that there are issues around costs in particular such as construction price inflation and we are seeing this reflected in the budget costs for the projects. The message I have given to local authorities is that we want them to do due diligence on costs because we do not want over-inflated costs that are not realistic but we also recognise that there are increases in costs and we will be able to meet some of those. We have asked local authorities to look critically at that and other sources of funding that might be appropriate and help to absorb some of those additional costs. To give an example, a project with quite a significant increase in costs was able to secure some funding from our colleagues in the NTA to fund the active travel parts of it because there is funding there for active travel. This reduced the impact on the URDF element so we were able to absorb the rest of the cost.

We have an iterative process with the local authorities on budget development as projects move through the various stages of the public spending code. We are not telling local authorities that only a certain amount of funding is available and that is it. There is obviously a process to be gone through as these projects develop to the construction stage, and we are working with local authorities on that, looking at how much the fund can absorb and what other sources of funding might be available for other elements of the project that might be more suitable to, say, active travel or whatever else. Our colleagues in the National Transport Authority, NTA, and the Department of Transport have been co-operative in terms of those types of projects. I hope that answers the question. It is an ongoing process.