Mr. Charles Stanley-Smith:

As a former Chair of An Taisce, my views on what is happening in planning are probably not repeatable in this setting. Mistakes have been made in planning along the way and trying to restrict the ability of people who have a genuine reason to take appeals is the wrong way to go, but I will not get into that.

The potential of what is happening in the whole area of well-being is very interesting. The Government is doing top-down well-being statements and the like, and the PPNs are doing true bottom-up well-being statements. We are the only country in the world that is doing bottom-up well-being statements. Many countries are doing top-down statements. It is about the business of where these two meet. That is where we will find out an awful lot. We have got the idea of a climate action plan coming top-down but if we can bring the bottom-up into that, we will see where they do and do not meet. That is what we have to really concentrate on. That whole opportunity is there. We have to have top-down and bottom-up because there are some big, fundamental financial decisions to be made and so on.

I would like to see much more of an opportunity - and the PPNs can do this - to see where things fit together, not just in climate action but, as we have talked about, in social inclusion, disability and so on. How we move that forward is a difficult question. We have talked about local government and local councillors. We have a very good relationship with our local authority and our local councillors. The opportunity for all this is there, and we should look at that. As I have always said, there are hundreds of thousands of members of PPNs with a huge range of expertise, including their lived experience, within the PPNs. That lived experience is the key to climate action, biodiversity action - the whole lot.