Ms ?ine Stapleton:

To speak positively about the delivery of local authorities, they do a much greater proportion of own delivery than AHBs, which tend to rely mainly on what we call "turnkey" delivery. The latter is a simpler model in terms of approvals. Local authorities devote a far greater proportion of their delivery to own construction, which requires a significant number of steps to take something through design and planning that AHBs would not be required to do if they pick up a turnkey development. The local authority picture is improving. We have looked at some of the challenges they have in ratcheting up own-build because that is our policy. We looked at issues like the land acquisition fund the Secretary General mentioned earlier and we brought in emergency planning provisions to enable fast-tracking of planning for a temporary period. We resourced local authority teams to the scale of 250 staff for social housing delivery. I expect, taking those measures into account, that we will see significant ratcheting up of both the speed of local authority delivery and the scale of own-build delivery.