Mr. Niall Cussen:

The presentation submitted to the committee gives it some background in respect of the fast-track aspect of the legislation. All of this flows from pillar 3 of the action plan for housing and homelessness which correctly identifies land supply, land management and the availability of ready to go sites with planning permission as very important parts of ensuring there is a well-functioning development sector and market for land, which obviously feeds back into affordability and supply. Banks and financial institutions tend not to lend to persons intending to develop land without live planning permission with some time to go. The only lenders to purchasers seeking to purchase land to seek permission to build on are private equity, high interest lenders or people with a lot of cash to deploy. If one looks at the property press and sources of information about development sites that are trading and so on, one can see that there is quite a shortage of ready to go sites that have been through the planning process and have recent permission with several years to run. This is a very strong message coming from the sector. The information available to us is that the length and risk involved with the planning application process are becoming major deterrents to lenders. It is the scarcity of ready to go sites with permission rather than the raw amount of zoned land that is an important issue in terms of ensuring the affordable supply of land, etc. There has been much comment about the duration or efficacy of the planning process at the moment, which very much comes from the legislation and what is theoretically possible.

As we review planning applications that are being handled by local authorities, principally in Dublin and other major urban areas, we are looking at how this pans out on the ground. The second slide summarises the typical process duration for large applications. In respect of the pre-application consultation process, it can take up to six weeks to get an appointment. There may be several meetings involved and someone could arguably be looking at two or three months going through that phase before they get into a position to have enough information to hand to finalise and submit their planning application. As many commentators have said, local authorities can determine a planning application within eight weeks but we would see that most planning applications for large housing applications are subject not only to additional information requests but clarification of additional information requests. This tends to drag out the process to six months or more. This begs the question as to how efficiently the pre-application consultation process is working in the first place if all of these issues have not been ironed out at that stage.

As our opening statement concludes, the vast majority of large housing applications are appealed to An Bord Pleanála so that is another four to five months. To give members a better flavour of what is happening on the ground, we asked our colleagues in An Bord Pleanála to look at a batch of large applications - 100 plus applications - that were considered and decided by Bord Pleanála in 2016. We could have gone back a bit further but there have been very few applications of that scale because of the economic crash in previous years. There were about 18 cases we were able to look at in 2016. It is quite a complex process because one is literally opening up files and trying to go through the chronology of all the steps that led to a file. This is an initial and ongoing analysis so we may need to come back and vary some of this. What jumps out at us is that the average period taken to get permission, taking into account the planning authority and An Bord Pleanála phases, is about a year. The best case scenario would be a bit better than that at 26 weeks for the planning authority and 18 weeks for An Bord Pleanála. It is important to stress that An Bord Pleanála achieves pretty much all its statutory objective period, SOP, objectives in terms of housing applications. It prioritises planning appeals for large housing applications. The longest case, to which I will return, took 82 weeks, or 18 months, to get through the process. What is also striking is that most local authority decisions on large housing applications are invariably upheld. Some are varied. What is also striking in terms of the analysis is that An Bord Pleanála tends to dramatically reduce the number of conditions attaching so that comments on whether or not local authorities are getting into excessive detail on the matters they regulate by way of condition.

Our view would be that the current two stage process is taking 12 to 18 months or longer in some cases.

We believe the current two-stage process is taking 12 to 18 months or, in some cases, longer. This brings limited added value because effectively applicants get the same decision at the end of the process. This really starts to hit home when we look at the financial implications. Let us assume a site cost of €40,000 per home, which is an average site cost - obviously, some will be lower and some considerably higher. Anyway, purchasing a site for 200 homes on that basis would cost approximately €8 million. The holding cost of that if we work on an assumption of 10% interest and so on is, approximately, €4,000 per home per year. It is the home purchaser or renter who picks up the holding cost at the end of the day, because that is the way of it in the context of a viable development. This really has and can have a significant impact on affordability.

We picked out two case studies. They are represented by the first of the bar charts on display. The bar chart is self-explanatory. It has a development of 284 units and a development of 410 units. What is striking about these two schemes is that they are effectively NAMA-backed projects. They are well funded and have well-organised design teams and so on. The committee will see that the 284 unit development spent approximately 14 weeks in the pre-application stage. Then it was in the local authority for 50 weeks. Then, the An Bord Pleanála process dealt with it in 18 weeks. In the case of the other development the period was 53 weeks. These may be at the outer end, but these are exactly the scale of projects that we need to deal with the housing crisis, but they are taking in effect 18 months or more to get through the process.

The next bar chart compares averages that we might look at in the context of the batch of 18 or so cases. We have more work to do to finesse this, but upon initial analysis we can see that the comparison between this process and the fast-track process is stark, with a difference between 18 months on the one hand and a guaranteed process of determination within 25 weeks on the other hand, albeit in a straight "Yes" or "No" situation. This highlights the importance of the pre-application process, getting it right, getting everyone around the table, understanding the issues and positioning in order that a final decision can be made.

The map on the next slide shows the general shape of and how large cases before the board have been dealt with over the past decade. We are grateful to our colleagues in the board for providing us with this information. Again, it has a metropolitan focus. This is really an issue for Dublin, Cork and other large urban centres such as Galway. To some extent it applies to the Dublin commuter belt as well.

I will hand over to my colleague, Mr. Sheridan. There are two slides that go through the main processes of the An Bord Pleanála direct process.