Dr. Mark Cassidy:

That is a very important issue. We have a very ambitious, appropriately so, national development plan, targeted at housing, climate action and other things, as the Deputy mentioned. Recent developments make it more challenging. In particular, we are seeing higher building costs and higher costs in construction, partly because of the effects of the Covid pandemic in respect of supply chain disruptions and partly because of how the energy crisis is feeding in to that. If the costs of delivering on the national development plan for the next decade increase, then it becomes more difficult. That is one thing.

The second issue is that some parts of that plan, though not all, will require quite significant additional labour over the lifespan of the plan, including building houses and retrofitting. Some of that labour will need to be sourced from abroad so there is always some risk as to whether the economy can attract the necessary labour over the duration of the plan. At present, we do not anticipate or forecast any deviation but if the economy gets closer to capacity, there are then risks in respect of costs and availability of labour, which are things that need to be monitored over the duration.