Mr. David Healy:

One of the things that is striking from the three regions is that our policy focus is very much aligned. We all have the same kind of vision of regional development. It is not that we see it as the regions competing against one another but that we would act with that kind of regional development emphasis and see about ensuring development is well spread and not overly focused. I will address one of the key areas of that. We can see there are some areas where things have not gone the way that we wanted. Within the recent planning legislation, for example, there has been a weakening of the monitoring provisions. They are still there and we as assemblies intend to keep doing the monitoring but we would rather see them strengthened rather than weakened obviously. We are bringing up the Cohesion Fund regional development issue and it would be a major threat if that were to go in the wrong direction.

In terms of pushing to go in the right direction, there are issues about funding. As assemblies, we do not have any independent source of funding. There is, therefore, a bit of a zero-sum game when it comes to the relationship between us and the local authorities to whom we have to go to get money. That would be a significant change. That could help with some of the communications issues that we have around our profile and people's understanding of our role.

There is also a kind of a technical issue with the timing of consultations. As we are responding to public consultations, we are operating on a month-by-month schedule to our meetings. Often, the length of time made available for public consultation is not long enough for our executives to do the research work, prepare a draft and then bring it to our meetings for consideration and discussion if the four-week period does not align. That has not been considered in the design of the legislation and in the setting out of timescales.