Mr. Michael McCarthy:

It is a very interesting topic with regard to housing itself. Our function is to liaise with stakeholders and produce our reports. We do that by conducting profiles. We use the information we get directly from local authorities via the performance indicators in terms of building our profiles of the local authorities. We also liaise with the Local Government Management Agency. We use statistics it would give us in order to inform our own reports. There are quite a lot of housing indicators in this area so they are probably not already covered by the Department in some of its reports. It depends very much on the prism from which one would view that. I think the figures on the approved housing bodies are gathered directly by the Department. We take the information the Department gave us, evaluate the information and produce our own reports. We are very much dependent on multi-stakeholders in terms of pulling together our own data, if that makes sense.