Mr. Paul Hogan:

We are using the working title Ireland 2040 because we are taking a long-term view. It is a long timeline. The national planning framework, Ireland 2040, will be the successor to the national spatial strategy, which was the one and only previous national spatial planning document. As such, Ireland 2040 will be the spatial expression of Government policies. It will draw together all the different Departments' priorities that have a spatial dimension. It is led by the Department of Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government but is a whole-of-Government document. It will be necessarily high level and strategic, given that it must address national priorities and development goals, but it will be developed in parallel with and will lead into the three regional assemblies' regional spatial and economic strategies, RSESs, which will commence as soon as we have a draft national planning framework. As such, the national planning framework, together with the three RSESs, will be the basis for more joined-up policies and balanced regional development and will be the basis for or form the backdrop to planning investment and decision-making.

We all have a sense of the opportunities and challenges facing us as a country, but if we look 20 years or more ahead, it is likely that we will have to plan for up to an additional 1 million people in the country.

Over the past 20 years there has been in excess of that and we expect somewhere approaching that in most growth scenarios over the next 20 years or more. The likelihood is that because the population is ageing and household size is falling, the number of additional households will greatly exceed the average divided into a number of extra people. This means that we are looking at a minimum requirement of 500,000 additional households over the same period and this is a continuation of the current requirement of 25,000 homes per annum every year for the next 20 or more years. Although we will have a smaller workforce relative to the size of population, we will more than likely exceed the previous peak employment number of 2.2 million people. Against that backdrop we have looked at current trends over the past 20 years and there is a marked trend towards employment concentrating in and around larger towns and cities, yet housing has dispersed further and further beyond the settlements into the surrounding areas and around the edge of settlements themselves. When this is combined with an ageing population, with commitments to climate change and emissions, with expenditure considerations of service delivery and public expenditure and quality of life, we face considerable challenges.

The national planning framework, our national plan, is recognised as essential to ensure sustainable development goals. It has been referenced in the programme for Government. It has been cited by the action plan for housing as being important to a number of objectives. It is also referenced in the planning policy statement which dates from last year. In order for it to work, it is clear that the national planning framework must be backed by a wider policy alignment across all Departments and it requires alignment between planning and investment. That is one of the criticisms with regard to the previous national spatial strategy. The national planning framework will have statutory backing - this was the first planning recommendation of the Mahon tribunal, and this is covered under the Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill which, I believe, is on Second Stage. Since the national spatial strategy was done 15 years ago we have significantly changed environment legislation. It is now a requirement that the whole strategy would be subject to strategic environmental assessment. That may have a bearing also.

The schematic which members have sets out the national planning policy hierarchy; the national planning framework is at the top, the three regional spatial and economic strategies feed on from that and these influence the relevant city and county development plans and local economic and community plans at a local authority level. It cascades down from a strategic to a more detailed local level. With regard to the experience of the national spatial strategy, NSS, and our ambition for this project, we have concluded that the NSS offers an invaluable learning experience, and we could talk a lot about that but we want to move forward. There was an expert advisory group report commissioned in 2014. It is a short report that recommended that a future spatial strategy would be more focused, shorter, higher level and would deal with hard choices as required. One of the important recommendations also was that rather than having a wish list of things it would be a genuine strategy combining the desired objectives together where they can have best effect.

The evidence from the preliminary census this year, and we will have more census data in the coming months, confirms what I have already said about the dispersal of population and the concentration of employment. It is clear that growth is increasingly happening, particularly population growth but also economic growth, around our key cities and towns. This growth is not so much in the urban settlements themselves but in their hinterlands. If we talk about Galway, Cork or the mid-east region of Leinster, that hinterland area is where the fastest growth continues to be. We are seeing a trend towards increasing vacancy within our urban areas and more development led growth at the edge manifest as sprawl, as it would be commonly known. I believe there is a kind of parallel in that some of the more inaccessible or remote rural areas of the State share some of the characteristics of the central urban areas where there is a fall in population and a feeling that services are no longer available to people.

It is clear that the national planning framework must be different from the national spatial strategy and the key lessons are that it requires a whole-of-Oireachtas approach and that a degree of support, or a majority of support, will be necessary. Rolling Government buy-in through funding and other supportive means would also be important to underpin the implementation of such a strategy. With regard to the actual content of the document, it will be important that it addresses each region's different potential and avoids the concept or the perception that there would be winners and losers, as has been the case in the past. That does not mean that everywhere can be treated in the same way - different areas have different levels of potential, but it can certainly be analysed, influenced and progressed for the benefit of everywhere, if we can get it right. The ambition is that Ireland 2040, or the national planning framework, must, through an evidence base, establish a plan making vision that people will understand and buy into as a plan that can be realistic and responsive. It needs to be adaptable over time as clearly things will change. We cannot anticipate everything that is going to happen over 20 years and we need to build in a mechanism for review.

There are four key areas of the work programme, namely, the governance of the project, communication and consultation, framework development and environmental assessment. With regard to governance we have put a structure in place, with the national planning framework team at the core of this at the moment, to progress the material to move the project ahead. The team is reporting to a cross-departmental steering group that involves representation from all the different Departments and the regional assemblies. This is chaired by the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government. We are also establishing an advisory group to reflect a broad range of sectoral and other interests. Feeding into this team is a series of working groups to address important aspects of the project such as the environmental assessments, demographics and more day-to-day and month-to-month interactions with the regional assemblies.

I will now turn to the education and consultation area of the programme. As Mr. Walsh has said, we undertook some initial high level engagement with stakeholder engagement in July. One aspect of this included a briefing to Members of the Oireachtas. We invited a range of different bodies, including infrastructure agencies, environmental and business groups and people who are concerned with society generally, to a series of events and posed a number of questions. We facilitated responses to get a feel for what people's views were. We have drafted a report on that engagement which will be made available as part of our general public consultation which we expect to launch in January. For those members who are familiar with the local development plan process, the pre-draft consultation in January is an opportunity for all interested citizens in our society to interact with the process and to give their views before we prepare a plan. We will prepare an issues and options paper to provide information at a number of different levels. There will be a basic summary overview as well as some more detail for those who are interested. The intention is that we will have a draft national planning framework by the second quarter of 2017.

The sort of questions we have been asking and on which we will reflect in the issues paper and for public consultation are what Ireland should look like in 20 years and how we ensure every place can realise its potential. We posed questions about jobs, housing, services and the wider context such as Northern Ireland and the relationship between the two islands and the EU. We also asked about the key environmental challenges, national infrastructure priorities, what the game changers might be, how we would implement a strategy into the future and what success might look like with regard to the outcomes at the end.

With regard to framework development, we are obviously taking on board what we hear from the stakeholders, regional assemblies and others. The public stage is next. We are certainly influenced by the Scottish national planning framework. A slide shows the cover of the third planning framework for Scotland, which is a very useful document. It seeks to strike a very good balance between addressing the whole of the territory without getting into very great detail that should be dealt with at a more regional or local level.

We are working with the Economic and Social Research Institute on demographic and econometric modelling projecting what the future might hold although it is not necessarily a predict-and-provide economics-led model. We must obviously take into consideration a whole range of other societal factors, including geography. We are using the model, however, to test some of the more technical scenarios in terms of what different options might lead us to or result in. There is an environmental assessment under way. We have appointed the consultant RPS to do that work on our behalf.

On the modelling inputs, the spatial data modelling and mapping services are being provided by the All-Ireland Research Observatory team in National University of Ireland Maynooth. We are a small team within the Department but we are working with a range of outside bodies and are very much open to all of that.

The second last slide shows where we got to in terms of strategic issues and policy choices. The key question regarding how we approach the way forward concerns determining the extent to which we follow the business-as-usual scenario, which is really pointing to an increasing level of development in Leinster, influenced by Dublin. Having said that, Dublin is critical to the national economy. It is not a case of Dublin or somewhere else but of Dublin and everywhere else. In getting to this stage, one of the first points we want to address is planning for people. In other words, it is a matter of determining what planning means for people over the course of the period we are talking about, particularly in terms of society and quality of life. Ultimately, people are concerned about what it means for them and their standard of living.

The second set of factors is really about the place-making strategy, which is really what the special planning is about, starting off with a vision for Dublin but then covering other cities and towns. There is an important role for elsewhere, such as regional cities and larger towns. We also need to examine the strengths and opportunities for the regions. By "the regions", we mean everywhere else in Ireland. We must determine how development can be balanced appropriately. It is important that we consider a future for rural areas. The backdrop has been one of growth, certainly over the past 20 years, but the resilience may have been challenged owing to population decline, certainly in the north and west, over the past five years. We need to consider a strategy to address that.

We must also consider the all-island, European and global contexts. We operate in a very uncertain, changing world. While we cannot account for everything, we must be adaptable enough to make changes if and when required. We must co-operate with our neighbours.

Regarding opportunities for integrated land and marine development, the concept of marine spatial planning is one which we are obliged to put a system in place to deal with over the next few years. The national marine territory is ten times larger than the national land territory. A system must be set up as part of the process.

With regard to equipping Ireland for future development, we are talking about infrastructure and infrastructure co-ordination. Obviously, it is also about aligning investment and setting out what the priorities might be. An important balance must be struck by us between identifying key national projects and a lot of local and longer-term projects that follow.

On making a virtue out of Ireland's unique environment, an issue arises over environmental stewardship. I refer to the environment as a resource and also as a unique asset to be protected in some instances.

With regard to implementation and delivery, we must ensure the NPF is not just a book that sits on a shelf. It must be followed up and have meaning by being adopted across government.

I have mentioned environmental assessment already. It must tie in to the framework development process. At different stages, we must produce the various reports. It covers flooding and habitats.

With regard to the project timetable, we are finalising the issues and options paper as well as a communications strategy for our expected launch of the consultation process after Christmas, in January. We are keen to work with the committee throughout the process and to take feedback. It is likely there will be a period for submissions extending to the end of February. Then there will be a draft NPF for further consultation in the second quarter of the year. That will probably be after Easter, which is in mid-April. It will be April or May, at the earliest. It is possible for us to have a final draft for approval by the summer. That is the most ambitious timetable for us. Clearly, however, the decision on this will evolve, particularly as we prepare a draft.

We would like to build in a future update and review to coincide with the availability of future census data. Census data are regular and reliable and their publication is a national event. The likelihood is that there will be a cycle of five to six years. We will start a review after five years with a view to having it in place after six.

Our contact details are in our submission.