Ms Oonagh Buckley:

The disability question is one I can easily answer. We have a disability officer whose job it is to ensure that people can engage with the process. In fact, I was talking to him in the past week about ensuring we had a Braille machine in order that something could be translated from Braille into written language. We also do a lot of work around spoken programmes and so on. We therefore have, as is our requirement under law, a person who is there to enable people to engage with our processes. I am sure we can continue to improve that, but it exists as it stands.

With regard to the reasons, which are key, I am not in any way saying we will lose the transparency, but perhaps what I am saying is that there might be some rebalancing whereby a huge amount tends to be covered in a planner's report. The question has become how much of that needs to be covered again in the ground in the decision by the board. The reports are getting longer and longer, even for quite small and minor developments. I have no issue where it is a very big development - an EIA development or a strategic infrastructure development - but do we need to do this for Velux windows, to take an extreme example at the other end? I am not in any way suggesting that people should not understand the reasons a decision is given. I just wonder whether we have perhaps shifted too far for all decisions and whether there is either something we need to do within the board or something we can cover with the Department in the Act that will permit us to take decisions as efficiently as we can. It should be borne in mind that we will have these mandatory timeframes to commit to, so there is an element of transparency, quality and efficiency. It is just something we need to bear in mind.