Dr. Kieran McQuinn:

At the conference this morning, Niall Cussen, the planning regulator, made the point that the way planning is going, namely, putting the infrastructure in place first rather than what happened before where a housing estate would be build and we would wait for the infrastructure to catch up. There does seem to be a recognition that you need to put the infrastructure in place first. Even some of the research you have been doing on the housing programme would support that.

There is a planning component associated with the research programme we have in the Department of housing looking at servicing needs if there is an increase in housing in a particular area, including educational and healthcare needs etc. There is some element of that but it has not yet worked it way into official policy.