The Minister for Finance, in announcing the decentralisation programme in Budget 2004, made clear that the following factors were taken into account in selecting locations for the new decentralised offices: the need to achieve a fit with the national spatial strategy, in terms of the gateways, hubs and their respective catchments; the location of existing decentralised offices; the desirability of clustering a Department's decentralised units within a region; the importance of respecting the scale and character of locations in terms of their capacity to absorb the number of new jobs involved; the existence of good transport links by road, rail and/or air; and the general infrastructural capacity in the areas selected.