Mr. David Moloney:

I thank Deputy Clendennen very much for his questions. He is right that the 300,000 houses need water and electricity. We must plan that out, decide how we are going to do it and prioritise it within the national development plan review. It is true that there may be supplementary procedures within Departments that Accounting Officers use or that sectors use for their agencies. There are also approval processes between agencies and Departments. One of the things we are going to do as part of the exercise that we have described is construct indicative timelines for particular types of projects. We are going to look at the time the different parts of the decision-making chain take. That will identify for us where the problem lies. For example, when we did that before for some housing projects, we found that for run-of-the-mill housing estate projects, in some ways the delays all happened before they went to planning. That can be instructive. As we run out those timelines, that information will feed into the report Mr. Cleary spoke about.

In terms of the value-for-money aspect, we have significantly changed it through the introduction of the infrastructure guidelines. The Deputy referred to the four years of my tenure. In that time, we redeveloped the national development plan in 2021, which was a strong change that prioritised spending and implemented it in government. Many of the projects we are talking about today have come through that process. In particular, what we have managed to do under the current phase of the national development plan is to deliver more than 800 schools. As I look around me, I note there are areas of delivery that demonstrate the capacity to deliver at local level. We know that electricity and the grid are significant disablers, as things stand, and that we must invest in them in order to make progress in the future.