Mr. Philip Jones:

There is one additional point which is important to mention. Guidance should allow for local authority members to craft their development plans to suit their own objectives for a local authority area. We must not forget that everything should not be decided in the Custom House and issued to local authorities. We need to have popular views, through their elected members. There is a balance there and the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR, obviously does that by ensuring that within the hierarchy, if certain objectives are included within a particular development plan that do not comply with national policy, there is a provision there whereby it can make recommendations which go to the Minister. If one is going down to the minutiae of development management requirements, like distances between houses and so on, there are variations around the country and we should not have a planning Act where everything is decided in great detail and comes down from on top. We have to allow for local conditions. We had this with some of the people before in respect of some of the local authorities and the managers. There are differences in densities between Dublin City Council, the centre of Dublin, the edge of Dublin, and the edge of a small town in the middle of the countryside. One cannot have a standard which applies everywhere as there are different circumstances. It is a balance.