Mr. Niall Cussen:

I wish to come back to the good point Deputy Casey made. I might have left the impression that somehow we were looking at planning exemptions and not examining the wider performance or the interaction between the performances in different regulatory regimes affecting the re-use of upper floors. Very usefully, within the Custom House, there is building control, fire regulation and all of the different areas. We are working together to look at what further streamlining or measures we can put in place, particularly where one is dealing with the conversions of upper floors and is not in a new-build situation but is dealing with legacy issues. There is a concern on whether that affords too much discretion or too much opportunity for people to be able to find innovative solutions to atypical situations they find themselves in and so on. That is something my colleagues in the fire and the building standards areas and in our own area are working through at the moment. The building standards area already affords building control officers some discretion, but the degree to which that is used consistently among officers is something we need to look at and bolster, be that through further guidance, support structures, training or something else.

It is important that there is a whole-of-system approach to finding creative solutions in order to get disused commercial properties into residential use. We will be happy to come back and update the committee on the outcomes of that with the relevant professional colleagues on my side in due course.