Mr. Hugh Creegan:

We spent a number of years building up our capability to deliver active travel projects. Three or four years ago, we had only a small number of local authorities with personnel dedicated to it. Now, as the committee will be aware, teams have been built up in every single local authority, so we have reached the happy stage that we have a pipeline of projects to deliver. The Department is aware of this, but one of our challenges we see going forward is whether the funding will be there to deliver it all. It will be a real challenge.

The second thing is that these projects are getting more controversial and appear to be getting more challenging to deliver. The committee recognises the full benefit of them, we recognise the full benefit of them, but there is an education process still required out there among the public to understand that there are a lot of positives from doing this. Maybe as some of these schemes start to mature, they become self-evident in that positivity, but we are definitely finding it a real challenge to get the public buy-in to proceed with some of the schemes. We are conscious of the need to speed things up and we have developed a low-cost rapid-build guidance for the local authorities that will require them to look at every single scheme to see if we can do a lower cost scheme in a quicker way. As Deputy Leddin said, it might not be the most glamorous, perfect scheme in the world, but it is perfectly adequate and safe. We are pushing every local authority with every single project to test against that first before going forward. We hope that will add a little impetus to some of these schemes. The two big challenges will be, now that we have built up a pipeline of projects, the funding to support them and then the public buy-in. I know some of that still sits with us to try to educate people and probably some of that still sits with the wider community. They are the two big challenges we face.