Mr. Paul Hogan:

I will outline this and then ask my colleagues to come in. The primary reasoning behind this is to reduce the process requirement on planning authorities. As things stand, a development plan is reviewed every six years. It is a fairly significant review process, and it takes two years out of the six years to actually complete the review and write out the development plan. The intention here is to stretch out that process to ten years, enabling the two-year review every ten years and also a one-year review mid cycle. So, instead of two out of every six years being in process, it will be three years out of every ten years.

That allows more time for what we might consider to be real planning work, including engaging with local communities on area plans, seeking funding and putting measures in place for funding schemes that are coming available for vacancy and town centre first, for example.

The second logic behind this is to allow for a longer arc in the pipeline of development to enable strategies to take a longer view ahead to look at more sites and land, but also reflecting the realities of infrastructure delivery to serviced land and to get improvements in place for infrastructure delivery. There is, as I have said, a review opportunity after five years, so if progress is not being made, that can be reflected at that stage. If progress is being made very rapidly, that can also be reflected to take a further look ahead.