Mr. Eddie Taaffe:

I will leave the refusal rates to Ms Leech to answer. On the treatment plants, we need to do something to address the issue of development in more rural parts of Ireland in smaller towns and villages. We are not going to be to provide Rolls-Royce treatment systems everywhere. We need to think about what we can do and what we do quickly, but the balance has to be struck between environmental and sustainable. We have to be sure that whatever is put in meets the environmental standard, is going to be supervised and put in correctly, will do the job we need it to do and can be maintained. I sound a note of caution on what we call package plants on developer-provided infrastructure. There are still some legacy issues out there from pre-2008, but we need to address those and not say that we cannot do that anymore. We need to come up solutions that will work, will allow us to repopulate and expand some of our towns and villages.

On the four-stage approval process, first it is important to state that roughly speaking, approximately 80% of social housing delivery comes through a single stage process at the moment. The approved housing bodies, AHB, delivery and the turnkeys that local authorities do are all a single stage process. The four-stage process then kicks in for our own delivery on our own lands. There has been a lot of looking at it jointly between ourselves and the Department to streamline, to simply it and to understand it. It is not as a big of delay as it would have been several years ago. There is that trust now. The standard house layouts and the standard templates that we use are a huge assistance in that regard. At the end of the day, we have to have an approval process. We are spending significant amounts of public money here. We need to be sure that we are building the right houses in the right places to meet the right need and to the right standard. Having said that, in my view, the original target of 59 weeks is not achievable because by the time you procure a design team if you are going that way or do up your plans, get through planning and go through tendering, that is not physically possible in many cases. It does take longer than that. The issue on meeting the targets is that we need more projects. We need to keep doing what we are doing but we need more projects to meet our targets. However, that involves more staff, more project management, and more importantly, more land.