Mr. David Creighton:

The demolition of the units referred to earlier was due to the fact that they were, in many cases, substantially damaged, as can be seen from the photographs. A lot of them were single-storey units and they were suffering quite a lot of anti-social behaviour at the time. Part of the issue was down to the overall design of the estate. Many were end units with blank corners and from an urban design perspective, they would naturally be vulnerable. There were three or four single-storey units demolished and two two-storey units. The two-storey units were in the central part of the estate where we are proposing to demolish the majority of the buildings to provide the public open space that is required in the centre of the estate. That is the background to the demolition work that has been carried out so far.

In terms of the period of time that units remained boarded up, we suffered from a high turnover of staff. There have been five different project managers on that project since its inception. I was not involved at the very early stages and only took over in 2014. The project has suffered because of a lack of continuity in the project team.

Phase 1 involved 34 units, some of which would have been vacant, but that did progress and was completed in 2019. That significantly uplifted the estate. The rest of the units remain vacant because it would be difficult to reoccupy them and then remove tenants from them when they are either demolished or subject to significant upgrade works. When they are vacant it is relatively easy to go in, strip them out and get back to bare walls in order to do the work necessary to get them up to the standard we need to achieve, which is a building energy rating, BER, of B2 or above. We are talking about generating what are almost new buildings in terms of their energy performance. There is a balance between having units blocked up for a long period of time and having those units available when we need to either demolish them or have access to them for significant upgrade works.