Mr. Niall Cussen:

I have covered resourcing in terms of our strategic workforce plan. There are some issues. When my team is presented with, as happened recently, the accumulation of all the different parts of a county development plan that ran to 1,000 pages, there is a not inconsiderable task to understand and go through that in some detail. We are thorough in our assessments. I remember, for example, one particular county development plan where, at face value everything was fine. It was only when we went through the appendix to the appendix to the appendix that we found something that could have been a real problem due to evolving court judgments and so on. It was probably a benign enough approach from the local authority, which thought it was covering the point by not covering the point, but, nonetheless, it was something we spotted, albeit at the last minute and with people working late into the night. It is also important to recognise that the role of the office is to undertake a strategic assessment of development plans. It is not our role to be the planning authority or to second-guess everything. There has to be a certain amount of local discretion and local circumstances have to be taken into account.

I am confident that we are going through plans in a thorough and balanced way, correctly judging strategic objectives and so on. Sometimes in smaller cases - and Ms O’Connor might come in on this because she manages this stream for us on a day-to-day basis - there will be egregious examples, such as the flood risk I mentioned or the leapfrogging situation. In other words, there might be a village or town you have left and then lo and-behold there is another new thing that suddenly pops up at the edges and there are questions as to whether we have water services in place or how people are going to walk to where a zone of employment is going to be located. We zone in on those points in our methodology for the assessment of plans rather than trying to second-guess every aspect of the development plan. Ms O’Connor might want to come in on a point or two there.