Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

Yes. This goes back to the issue of resourcing. A lot of planning authorities have limited numbers of planners and take two or three people from their planning team and they will say, "Right, for the next two years you will be writing a development plan". Then, they get them back and put them into enforcement or something else.

In authorities where there are lots of local area plans, LAPs, because they have lots of larger settlements that they have to deal with, for example in counties Kildare, Meath and Wicklow. The problem they have is that those teams then keep going. They will have done the two years of the development plan and they will move into all the LAPs, they have to write for themselves. The new plan is looking at even more plans on top of that. While the LAPs are now gone, they will be replaced with others. Instead of it just being a matter of development plan and LAPs, now it is a matter of development plans, urban framework plans, priority area plans and joint area plans. There are more plans. Given the resourcing and the time it will take to do all that, one would be very lucky to achieve all that within the ten-year period.

Another issue about which we have extreme concern is where the new Bill expects the urban framework plans to be completed within one year of a development plan. That is just not physically possible. I will raise another issue, which is that there are discussions about having seven different specific areas to deal with. That is a challenge whether they are in the development plan anyway. Last but not least is the issue of rights of way, which is hugely challenging in its own right. Expecting local authorities to be able to resolve that matter is hugely problematic, because there are a whole load of legal issues around it. What we do not want to be doing is introducing more legal uncertainty into the planning process; we want less.

In terms of-----