I will pick up on some of the things Mr. Cussen mentioned. The national planning framework is just the first stage. In looking towards implementation, we have characterised it now as being the end of the beginning, as it were. We are now trying to put in place a roadmap on how this will be implemented. As it stands, we only have the national tier piece of the jigsaw in place. We have to work through with the regions, local authorities and the local government sector as the next stage. That will not happen overnight; it will take the rest of this year into early next year for the regional strategies to be put in place. Thereafter the county plans will have to reflect that and will have to be varied, which will take into 2020. Realistically those plans will last for six years, as they do, up to 2026.
The first stage is the first ten years which will coincide with the national development plan and will be measurable in 2026 with the outcome from the census at that stage. We are talking about the first ten years in terms of implementation. We need to issue guidance now. We have met the planning teams from all 30 local authorities at this stage. We prioritised that because we wanted to engage at the local government level. They are key stakeholders for us. We have listened to what people have had to say, their concerns, their questions and what they need to know more about. We have committed to issuing a roadmap with further guidance on the RSES procedure in particular by late April or early May. Some questions arose. How will population be addressed? What should the MAPs, metropolitan area plans, cover? They form a new element of planning. We see them as a co-ordination piece where there are a number of local authorities, particularly in the cities.
In addition there is the question about bringing plans into synch. The legislation before the Seanad at the moment, if enacted, will ensure that no development plans will commence for a period until such time as the regional plans are in place next year. That will enable a better synchronisation of the county plans with the regional ones and everybody to be working off broadly the same set of objectives, which is what we have started to put in place at a national level. This is a kind of work in progress as members will know.
The current regional and county plans are based on figures derived from the 2006 census. There are an additional 300,000 people in the country now. We are out of synch in numbers as it stands. We have started to update and rectify that situation. We have to work through that. It cannot change overnight. It will take ten years to roll through. As I said, this is long-term planning. We are not seeking to restrict numbers. We are reluctant to issue what we see as an updated set of figures that risk becoming out of date very quickly. We need to look at it more creatively in terms of a range, a relationship to the national average or something like that. We are giving detailed consideration to that at the moment. This issue has been raised by many local authorities in our meetings in recent days.
There obviously has to be some balance as well. I will shortly come to the targets we have set for urban growth and why they are important. As well as the cities, there is also huge concern over how large towns, smaller towns and villages across the country are developing, particularly further west. Of course rural housing continues to form an element of Irish housing provision. All that needs to be balanced up. One of the problems we have had throughout the process is that people perceive there to be unlimited demand for everything and that somehow we can address every issue, city growth, strong towns, strong villages and unlimited one-off housing.
We do not have the levels of growth, however, to sustain the aspirations across the board for city growth, strong towns, strong rural towns and unlimited one-off housing. Balance and prioritisation are required. We are trying to enable decisions to be made for the bigger places at national and regional levels and to enable a sufficient degree of choice for local elected members at county level. We do not want to restrict things or to give a set of numbers that cannot be changed as we are all too aware of the possible intended consequences of doing so. In Wicklow in 2016, there were 22,000 fewer people than planned for, because the figures in the 2006 census had become so outdated. It is a consequence of the downturn and we need to update it. We accept that there was a need to bring rural housing policy in line with what currently exists and we have done that. The distinction between rural and urban reflects the current guidance, which was put in place in 2006 or 2007. The closer one gets to larger urban centres the more limited the demand if one qualifies, and qualification thresholds are difficult to police on the fringes of an urban area.
In transport infrastructure implementation, we are working to buy into, embed and mainstream the strategy across Departments and agencies. We started with the local authority sector and we will continue to do that with agencies such as TII, the NTA, the IDA and Irish Water, all of which are critical stakeholders and are very keen that we have a strategy to which everyone can sign up and work towards. There is good rail infrastructure in Wicklow and good potential on foot of that.
There was a question on the town plan for Drogheda. Many of the same principles of our co-ordination plans will apply to towns as well as cities, particularly the five towns mentioned, as they are equally applicable to large towns throughout the country. There is a whole-town plan, as opposed to a local area plan, to address land and development and while there are in a couple of cases, particularly Athlone and Drogheda, issues relating to governance of the planned process, this is simply because they straddle more than one jurisdiction. We are working closely with our local government colleagues on those issues but we have enshrined the principle of a whole-town plan in our framework. The decision on how it is governed is a matter that can be dealt with separately.
Deputy Ó Broin asked how we would achieve the targets, which is a key question and one with which we have grappled throughout the process. As Mr. Cussen said, we do not have a warehouse full of people whom we can send to different parts of the country. People are attracted primarily to where there are jobs and where there is good infrastructure and a good quality of life. We are trying to encourage employment growth through foreign direct investment, local enterprise and focusing on places that have scale and have good third level institutions. They need to be networked, by which I mean have a relationship to adjoining places, such as Athlone working with surrounding towns in the midlands of Tullamore, Mullingar, Longford, Ballinasloe, etc. Athlone is the centre of a transport network, has a third level institution and is well positioned in relation to the other towns. There is potential for all the towns to work together in a collaborative way. Collaboration is a really important criterion when making bids for regeneration funded by the urban and rural generation fund. It is about scale and agglomeration and it is about third level institutions ensuring their graduates stay in the region. The research paper which supports the document confirms all of this and it is why there is a focus on the cities and on a relatively small number of regional centres.
I was asked about Clonburris and the question of infrastructure following development. This is an age-old question in planning and we are moving towards it slowly, getting it right in some instances. I wrote the plan for Adamstown 16 years ago and we introduced the concept of phasing infrastructure with development. It was hugely controversial at the time and there was a fear that we would encourage 20,000 people to come over ten or 15 years, with up to 10,000 houses needing to be built. It has not worked out like that and has been much slower but all the infrastructure is in place. The same railway line runs through Clonburris, and there are railway stations that are disused at the moment. The plan indicates everything that will happen over a long period of time but the roll-out of development is invariably much slower, which enables the infrastructure to follow with good policies. We are doing everything to make sure that alignment happens.
The spatial dimension of social disadvantage has been raised by Deputy Ó Broin on previous occasions and we have looked at it in detail. It is a very interesting analysis and the Pobal document is published every year. At national level, the difficulty is that a small number of counties, namely, Dublin, Cork, Galway, Meath, Kildare and Wicklow, are marginally above average and the rest of the country is marginally below average. It is only when one drills down to a local level that the pattern emerges but we are not operating at that level of detail. Approximately 70% of the country is marginally above or marginally below the average so there is no particular pattern of disadvantage or advantage. Another 15% is advantaged to some extent - the word used for this is "affluent" - and a further 15% is disadvantaged to varying extents, though this is improving. This 15% is geographically scattered and is best dealt with at local level, at county level or the level of a local area or town plan. We would be willing to indicate that this be taken into account in town plans and housing assessments but it is not appropriate to the level at which we operate. We have addressed the issue on a broader front, such as education, access to employment, to services and to transport.
I have covered the main points. As we are developing the implementation strategy, we will be open to suggestions and input on how we can further advise agencies, Departments and the local government sector.
