Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

Secondary school places is another issue that is very misunderstood in terms of how they apply. There is a lot of information. There are childcare committees in every local authority. They are the go-to people for anybody who is preparing one of those childcare audits. That is where they go first. Developers are not interested in subjective information; they want objective information. They do not want to be lodging applications that are full of "fibs", because it does not benefit them. Nine times out of ten, they will get found out. There is another dynamic at play. When a childcare audit is being done, one of things that has to be done is a survey of all the local crèches that are within a certain distance of the development to determine if they have any spaces. The person that is being asked that question has two problems. If they admit to having loads of spaces, then there will not be another crèche in competition with them, whereas if they say the crèche is stuffed to the gills and ten kids are on a waiting list, then there is potentially going to be a competitor down the road. There is a conflict of interest in terms of how they answer those questions.

The way around all of these issues is objective data collection, such as a mandate that crèches have to provide data on a monthly basis to the Central Statistics Office, on the number of crèche spaces that they have, the number on the waiting list, if they have one, and the number of free spaces they have. That way, there are data available that everybody can use and that they can objectively look at. That is the way those problems are solved. We should not give planning authorities more jobs to do. They do not have the staff to do it as it stands. Giving them more responsibilities is only going to create a bigger problem. If we can collect and make available objective data sets, or get the CSO to collect them, then everybody can use the same data, it is very clear and there is no question.