Mr. Gavin Lawlor:

On better co-ordination, that is exactly why we set up the Office of the Planning Regulator – to try to ensure that better co-ordination. It is an improving office. The amount of work that the OPR has got through, in fairness, in the time it has been in existence and the ambition it has to do more should be congratulated. We should be clapping ourselves on the back. It is a job well done so far. Is everything perfect? No. Are there things that can be improved? Absolutely, but that is what reflection is about. How could we do more co-ordination? We need to start listening more to the development community and communities. I mean that in the true sense – listening and hearing what they are telling us about what works and does not work.

They are the two sides of almost the opposite coin. We constantly demonise developers but there are some very good developments out there that are very well done, and there are some poor ones as well. Equally so, we have communities in desperate need of more community infrastructure, better engagement and more education in terms of the land use and planning development space. We need to listen and engage more, whether that is through the OPR, more collectively through the planning forum or through some other mechanism. I do not know what the mechanism is but we definitely need to listen more and better understand what the impediments are to an improved society and a better planning system.

We are not there yet; we are far from it. We keep throwing policies, more legislation and a manual for this and that. Do we need a policy about this? Do we need a policy about that? We need to start listening and collecting evidence. In the IPI, we are huge advocates of evidence-based planning. I do not think we have enough evidence to support some of the decisions we are currently making on the way forward. We need more evidence. That is not to say we should slow down, rather, we should speed up. We need to speed up because we are so far off the targets at this stage that it is scary.