Mr. James Benson:

I will let the planner in the room answer on proper planning and let those who are good at what they do, do it. For the record, I am not part of the planning elite.

The Deputy inadvertently raised a very important point that we had not touched on yet today. We have spoken about the capacity of the sector to deliver. There is no doubt that we have a very complex regulatory legislative environment. The guidelines are challenging at times. The committee has done great work on that by means of pre-legislative scrutiny and other debates. This debate today is wholly welcome. What people do not always appreciate is the level of complexity in the ecosystem in which a number of stakeholders are operating in the context of delivering homes. There are 31 local authorities with 31 different preferences and policies. There are also Housing Agency, the Housing Finance Agency, the Housing Alliance and the LDA. There are many very positive contributors to housing delivery, but there is a need for an alignment in that regard. Everyone in the room is kept awake at night wondering where the solutions lie. We have come before the committee to discuss this matter over many years, but I take a lot of confidence from the level of access and the open-minded attitude of many of those individuals across many of those bodies. There is a willingness to learn and to take from the private sector the expertise that exists and what has been learnt from various ways of working. I take a lot of heart from the fact that there is a greater level of collaboration and alignment between private and public. This gives us an opportunity to improve on delivery. With that open mindset, where local authorities are constrained with resources and capacity issues, we should use the private sector, master planning, what has been learnt and the appetite and the energy and the commercials that are available often from the private sector, to support them in what they need to do.