Ms Karen Kenny:

On page 25 of the revision document we have included a paragraph to state that in order to understand compact growth trends development in cities and towns must be monitored in a consistent way. We are getting some data from the regional development monitor but we feel we need to start looking at all areas in a more consistent way to understand more what is happening. We have committed to a new approach to monitoring urban growth whereby it will be focused on the built-up footprint of existing settlements, comprising areas subject to existing urban land use and the additional land take associated with development outside the built footprint, and it is being developed to track and compare urban development trends in the main urban settlements. We have started some work on this.

We have slightly tweaked the national policy objectives. While leaving the targets the same, we have referred to ensuring compact and sequential patterns of growth. We have provided more detail on this in the 2024 settlement guidelines, with regard to the sequence of how development should occur. We have also changed the footnote to the three national policy objectives that refer to the 30%, 40% and 50%. As Mr. Fulcher said, this is to move away from the CSO definition of a boundary to focus more on the built footprint as defined by urban land uses, while having more compact growth outside of this. While we have not changed the targets we have changed the emphasis and focus, and we have committed in the draft revised document to develop tools to monitor better how it is happening. Before we start changing targets we need to look at how the implementation of the activation measures mentioned earlier are working and understand them better. We need to keep watching and looking at this and tweaking it, which is what the relevant section of the revision document states.