Mr. John Spain:

Certainty is the most important thing. People want to know when they are going to get the decision. From talking to international investors, it is due to this open-ended process that they find it very difficult to manage their business and their investment in that they do not know when the decision is coming. Certainly, 16 weeks should be the default in most of the appeals and most decisions of the board should be able to be made in 16 weeks, provided the board is resourced to do that. That is the critical point. Whatever result is wanted, if they do not have the resources, they will not be able to do that, and that means resourcing at inspector level, at administrative level and at board level.

We welcome the provisions to expand the board but there is now real urgency to put in place those extra board members. They were needed a long time ago, they are needed today, they are needed immediately. It should be 14 board members and that has to be an absolute priority right now. We have a very serious situation in terms of delays and they are getting worse as we speak, so that needs to be addressed. The legislation is there and it needs to happen in practice. Once that is in place, we can follow with the provisions in the Bill and fill that out with the actual timescale. I would certainly agree for more complex cases that a longer time period would be acceptable, say, 24 weeks for the largest type of housing schemes and more complex industrial projects. For those projects, the threshold could be 24 weeks instead of 16 weeks.