Ms Yvonne Harris:

Over the past 18 months, the process in Uisce Éireann has been changed to build in efficiencies and look at what worked well with developers and where we were less effective. Over the past 12 months, we improved our front-end process in our key performance indicators by 10% overall. In the connection application example that Mr. O'Connell spoke about, we issue 75% in ten weeks. Three of every four applications, where we have the information and it is straightforward, we issue in ten weeks. As he said, a complex one will take longer. If it was a binary question, the answer would be "No, we cannot support". It is not our desire. Our desire is to support housing and homes. We will take that complex application and go to colleagues across the organisation and get into modelling. We may have to get information from local authorities and we work away at it until we get the right answer and we can come back with a positive answer. Where we may not have been effective in the past is that we did not always communicate what we were doing and, therefore, the customer or developer might have been left wondering if the application had gone into a black hole. Therefore, we established a developer liaison group in Uisce Éireann and it engages in the region of 100 developers. We have one-to-ones with 35 developers. We attend all the CIF conferences and workshops. Our vision is to be accessible and transparent and visible to industry to so that developers big and small know how to get access to us and know who to come to so that we can resolve the issues.