Ms Maria O'Dwyer:

I might talk about our approach to investment planning in general. We very much endeavour to adopt a plan-led approach. Our investment is set, probably, by the policy directors and water services policy statement first. We have our own water services strategic plan setting out how we are going to deliver on Government priorities and what we see as the strategic long-term directives for water services to develop out over a 25-year period. We also engage with our regulators and other stakeholders.

In this specific area, if I focus on growth, we are very mindful of the regional spatial and economic strategies. They focus on the 48 core settlements, as members will be aware. Our capacity registers for water and wastewater are something we developed two years ago with the initial idea of engaging and being more collaborative with the planning authorities in terms of giving them tools to see where we had capacity in our water treatment plants and wastewater treatment plants. We have probably modified them and have a version of them, as we said earlier, up on our website. Those registers cover all the agglomerations we serve and all the areas we are serving with our water supplies. I will focus on the 48 settlements. What Mr. Gleeson pointed out is key, namely, if we just look at those, there is capacity in our treatment plants to service over 400,000 housing units. However, as Mr. Kelleher was talking about, it is a question of how to get that capacity out to new housing estates. That is where we are looking at our networks. With many network solutions we have a view they could be delivered in a year or two.

That is where we will be looking for the early engagement that Ms Harris spoke about earlier, in order that we could best deliver on that.

That said, there are strategic networks that it is our responsibility to deliver and it would be too much to expect any one developer to be able to do that. A lot of work has been done in recent times to start looking at master plans for different development areas to see how we will develop these out. We work in collaboration with the planning authorities in setting their county development plans to be able to share what areas we have capacity in and what areas we do not have capacity in. The message we try to put out to the development industry is that there is a lot of capacity in our system and that it is about aligning development into the areas we can serve now. It will take time to serve other areas. There will always be land parcels out there that are not serviced but it is only through good collaboration that we can work together.