Mr. Conor Skehan:

I thank the Chairman for giving the Housing Agency an opportunity to contribute. I will give a brief summary of the paper we have submitted. The Housing Agency, the sustainable communities agency, was established in 2012.

Approaches to Part V need to be more efficient, and its practical implementation and delivery must be linked to statutory timeframes, thereby binding the local authority and the applicant to agreements, schedules and timelines. The general scheme of the Bill does not advance this. Furthermore, housing authorities need to be able to advise on specific housing needs in specific parts of their area and address them with targeted and pre-identifed housing types. There is a fear that local authorities will not have the staff or expertise to deliver this, or to ensure adequate social housing is provided in a given area. Given the rapidly improving market in Dublin in particular, the provision of an element of affordable housing could be considered, particularly in larger cities and the greater Dublin area. This matter needs to be given regional consideration and we need to ensure enough measures on the supply side to ensure affordability.

Our members have highlighted significant difficulties with the vacant site levy as drafted in the heads of the Bill. There is no doubt that preventing land hoarding is laudable, but what is proposed in the heads of the Bill is considered problematic. There are many reasons a site might not be brought forward for development, and proving land withholding purely for commercial gain would be fraught with difficulty. Head 5B of the general scheme states the levy is aimed at enabling local authorities to incentivise the development of big sites. The incentive to develop through an unspecified reduction in capital contributions payable comes attached to a penalty for failure to develop. In other words, the penalty is quantified but the incentive is not.

The complexity of the proposed process and the opportunities to avoid the levy seem to undermine seriously the objective of the legislation. There are concerns about whether local authorities will have the resources and expertise to carry out this work. Overall, the institute is of the opinion that if a levy is to be apportioned to vacant property, consideration should be given to a broad site or land value tax as an alternative to the vacant site levy. We suggest this to avoid a patchwork of piecemeal fiscal incentives. Furthermore, any tax levy introduced should have a mechanism to ensure land in public ownership is subject to it. All of these difficulties are bolstered by the fact that "vacant" and "underutilised" are not defined in the general scheme. Defining these will be difficult.

With regard to reduced development contributions, the institute supports the key aim that future development contribution schemes must promote sustainable development patterns, secure investment in capital infrastructure and encourage economic activity. More emphasis needs to be placed on time periods and providing more consistency in general for development contribution schemes. There is concern that uncertainty about development contributions could hold up development due to fears that schemes which are currently viable may become unviable. There is also a requirement for a mechanism to assist funding local infrastructure upfront to speed up the delivery of housing and commercial projects. In the UK, revolving infrastructure funds are being introduced as a funding mechanism prior to infrastructure developments being completed. Consideration should be given to such a proactive fund here.

The use it or lose it proposal, whereby planning permission may be revoked if development does not proceed within a certain timeframe, risks reducing supply by increasing uncertainty for developers and investors. We are unclear as to what will be achieved through this amendment. In a normally functioning market this provision would have an impact, but we seriously question the introduction of this provision in the extremely volatile and unstable market we have at present. Furthermore, the principle proposed under the heads conflicts with the basic structure of the planning system, creating uncertainty and a lack of confidence in the system.

We raised a number of miscellaneous issues in our submission to the committee. The existing planning legislation has a number of deficiencies and no proposal in the general scheme addresses these. We will flesh out these deficiencies with the Department.

We acknowledge the publication of the heads of the planning and development (No. 2) Bill and will comment on them in future. Regarding another issue that we brought to the committee's attention, we are seeking for the term "planner" to be defined in legislation to ensure continuing transparency and credibility within the planning system.