Mr. Craig McLaren:

There is one thing I should have mentioned. In England, they try to grow their own. They have a graduate planning apprenticeship scheme that has had approximately 400 people on it since it started. It is actually starting to make a difference. We had a couple of people go through that process who subsequently became members of the institute.

That is a way in which people can learn on the job. It means we can get people in quite quickly. They get really good rounded experience because they are working on the job and getting the academic work at the same time. We are keen to explore that. This could be something we could perhaps look at in Ireland. In Scotland, the Royal Town Planning Institute, RTPI, put a business case forward to the Scottish Government on it as well. That idea of growing your own is perhaps one way of looking at it.

Perhaps one of the issues we have as a profession is that it is not always seen as an attractive profession for people to join. That does not help when a lot of people slag it off, to be honest. It is seen as a bad thing. That makes our jobs harder in trying to attract more people into the profession. We need to have a much more positive articulation of what planning is and what it can do and the impacts it can have so that we can then make it a much more attractive career option for people.