Mr. David Healy:

I thank the Deputy for the question. Our experience in the Eastern and Midland Regional Assembly has been - it is not just because the director is sitting behind me as it also applies to her predecessor - of a very high level of co-operation and respect for the fact we have the sign-off on submissions and the legal responsibility of making the RSES. The engagement is very constructive, but the Deputy is right about asserting ourselves as an assembly. We did that in making the last RSES, where we pushed quite strongly for greater ambition for public transport, came into a bit of conflict with the NTA which did not want to do that and ended up with the Minister appointing an inspector to figure out how ambitious we should be. That was a worthwhile process because we got something more ambitious than the NTA was aiming at for our region. As we go into the RSES we will be facing some of the same issues. One of the big challenges we have is how we do spatial planning, how we integrate our spatial planning with our transport planning, how we plan in particular the public transport networks and how we analyse and study that in order to meet our climate goals and remain within planetary boundaries. As we target that there will be a bit of tension with other levels of government.