Mr. Niall Cussen:

I thank Senator O'Reilly for her question. It is important to remember that as with local authority development plans, the national planning framework is a cyclical plan that will have to be reviewed or revisited by the Government in conjunction with all stakeholders on a regular basis. The Planning and Development (Amendment) Act 2018 established the legislative basis for the national planning framework and its renewal out into the future. That will ultimately be a matter for the Government and the processes are laid out in the legislation, including Oireachtas scrutiny of the preparation of revisions to the national planning framework.

As I mentioned in my paper, a very important starting point would be the compilation of a national brownfield land register or database. As it stands, with regard to the laudable objective of 30% for villages, 50% for cities and 40% in overall urban terms, it is actually very hard for us to monitor the effectiveness of development plans in a very precise way. It is very important that we start down the road of having those strong objectives in planning frameworks but the measurement of it, in terms of how it is actually being achieved on the ground, is still somewhat uncertain. That is an issue that we are continuing to research and to engage on with our parent department and the local authorities more generally.

In regard to the Senator's point about tweaking the framework while taking on board the latest scientific evidence and the evolving climate action objectives, that will naturally come in the round in terms of the evolution of the national planning framework. We need to think through the unintended consequences of having extremely ambitious targets for brownfield development without considering the deliverability and affordability of same. As Deputy Farrell mentioned earlier, in many cases local authority development plans will include brownfield regeneration sites and yet members will see, some years later, that progress towards getting those activated is slow. The effectiveness of our vacant and derelict sites legislation is an issue. The mechanisms and the tools that are available to local authorities to get brownfield development sites into production so that they provide sustainable, high-quality and affordable options for people are very important. If we have very high targets that are unattainable, effectively that displaces demand to other locations, as we have seen with some of the patterns of development around our cities, where we see suburban development.