Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

Anything we can do to increase the timeframe looking ahead around strategic infrastructure would be a good thing. That is stating the obvious. On strategic infrastructure, formal engagement with semi-State companies around a co-ordinated approach for infrastructure development is needed. A joint submission was made to this committee by a number of the semi-State companies on the planning framework.

I will comment on the question about the numbers in the submissions, in particular ours.

The CSO is the agency of record when it comes to new dwellings. That is what they actually measure. It is new dwellings as opposed to connections and, therefore, in our submission we mention connections to the network. It includes the housing schemes for houses and apartments and then the one-off. As we explain in our submission, there are a number of new connections - there is a number of farm connections - within that category.

We signed a memorandum of understanding, MOU, with the CSO in 2018 around the provision of data so that it can use that. It is the main source that they rely on because one has the formality of the meters going in and when they are energised, that is what feeds into the counting of the numbers. Ultimately, they take other sources in terms of generating the annual and quarterly numbers.