Mr. Kevin James:

I will respond to the ESB query. It is about taking the sentiment from our members. We have gone across the entire society. We look at projects and the roadblocks there are. We see projects that have reached completion and do not have power switched on, and the ESB is clearly under a lot of pressure. We do not want to make a scapegoat out of the ESB but we are trying to create improved dialogue so that we have greater visibility. Due to the interface with the ESB, you have to pay your fee and you have to make sure there is a commitment before there is engagement. We want to bring that forward so we understand where the bottlenecks can be. The priority is to get housing out to the market - the last thing we want to see is completed housing developments that we cannot switch on and allow people to occupy. With the ESB being a semi-State body, perhaps there are frameworks that can be introduced within it to help with the supply chain in capacity and to help the operatives with the connections. If they are under-resourced, perhaps that could be subcontracted out to the market and support could be made readily available for those particular sites to support the ESB. That is what we are trying to advocate for because there is a logjam and a bottleneck with the ESB.

I refer to the question on fire regulation standards and I completely agree. This is not about diluting any of the health and safety standards. We have found that there is a disparity in the interpretation of the regulations between different fire officers across the country. I have been working on sites in Dublin and Cork and the interpretation of the regulations can differ. We are advocating for more accountability for someone to make decisions because there is a lot of risk that anyone embarking on a construction project has to understand the rules of engagement with regard to fire compliance and safety and they employ their own fire safety consultants. When there are differences of opinion, they need to be ironed out but there is an interpretation of the regulations in one part of the country that differs from an interpretation in another part of the country. We understand the issues from Grenfell and what that has done to the market and we understand that the sprinkler installations that may be imposed on developers are an additional cost. What we are trying to do is bring forward visibility again so that we understand the cost. This is about risk mitigation and managing costs and for us, as consultants in the industry that are advising on what the budgets will be, our interpretations of the regulations have to be quantified and they have to be valued to go into a budget for a development appraisal to move forward. If that changes, we have to reverse engineer that and say that the fire officer wants us to do X plus Y. The cost of Y was not initially budgeted for so we have to go back and either take it out of contingency or find another way to make up for the overspend.