Mr. Richard Cronin:

In the context of planning, the consenting of activity is not our area of speciality. Perhaps I could speak to the general point. We have a standardised data-gathering mechanism across all of the European Union member states, and even those countries not in the European Union, for exactly the purpose to ensure that what we are measuring is comparable to each other so when we make our assessments they are the same assessments. Those data standards exist already. In head 25 of the Bill’s draft general scheme, we have made the particular point of having open access data. Again, this is because we recognise that issue. We have an acronym: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, FAIR. This speaks exactly to point the Chairman is making, which is that we aim to have to data collected and used for this purpose that we can reuse again and again. In our team our objective is that we measure once and use many times. It is the most cost-effective way of doing things.