Mr. Paul Hogan:

We have a set of guidance under preparation. It is at a fairly advanced stage and we have been very clear we need all forms of housing. We do need apartments, but we also need a variety of housing types throughout the country. What we are trying to do is reflect better the local circumstances. Certainly the suburbs of regional cities or within smaller towns throughout Ireland do not necessarily need the same scale of development or intensity of development that one might find in city centres, or the inner suburbs of Dublin. We need to better reflect the different contexts. That is very much within those guidelines. We also need to look at flexibility regarding own-door housing to try to encourage that because it is simply easier to construct on a piece-by-piece basis. This has advantages for phasing and sales. We can still achieve some element of density with that approach. That is partly what this is about.

To broaden it a little bit, because this guidance will come out hopefully fairly soon prior to the enactment of the Bill, it does raise the question of how we then transition new guidance into the legislation. What we would envisage happening is that we would write the guidance in such a way that we would be very clear about what the parameters of the policies and objectives are.

That would carry through into the new form of national planning statement. It would mean that when local authorities are applying standards to sites there would be a broad expectation of the range of development types that would be permissible and communities would understand that. Then the application that comes forward would not be a surprise, nor would those making applications have carte blancheto do whatever they liked.

At the other end of the scale, we are also looking at limiting the upper limit on density in certain circumstances. That is perhaps most relevant to cities. Perhaps there is an element of over ambition that is driving up the land cost.