Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 December 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

Draft Planning and Development (LRD Fees) Regulations 2021: Motion

Photo of Eoin Ó BroinEoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and the officials for the briefing. I have two sets of questions. First, let me dissent from the general consensus that seems to be that we adequately fund local government. We absolutely do not. Local government is chronically under-funded. Our housing departments and planning departments are stretched beyond belief. Covid-19 has exposed that probably more than ever before. We have a situation whereby there are a significant number of posts pending funding for our housing departments in local authorities. Some of these are dated back to requests from 2019. The situation is, therefore, not as rosy in the garden as the Minister of State seems to suggest. While I would welcome any additional money the Minister announces, my big worry is that there will be a time lead in between that announcement and when the posts are in place.

The Minister of State cannot tell us what the announcement is because the Minister would be then unhappy that he stole his thunder, and he would probably end up on "Callan’s Kicks" for that. However, can the Minister of State give us an indication as to how long it will be from when that announcement is made to when the staff will be in place? Large-scale residential developments will start hitting the local authorities early next year. I do not believe for a second - no matter how big the announcement is by the Minister - that the staff will be in place to do deal with that in the first half of next year. Some clarity around that would be helpful.

One other point I want to make on that is that it is important to remember that the local government sector lost more staff as a percentage of its total staff numbers after the crash in 2008 than any other sector of the public service. The figure was down to 25%. The vast majority of that has not been recovered. They are now back to working at the levels of output in planning and housing that preceded the crash. There is, therefore, a shortfall to get us back to standing still which has to be recognised.

On the fees, and I support many of the comments Deputy Higgins made, there is the line in the opening statement that the upper limit on certain fees will be raised from €9,500 to €20,000. Could the Minister of State explain how that relates to the fact that the overall fee structure does not change? Has there been any assessment by Mr. Sheridan, Ms Kenny and the staff on how much money is likely to accrue to local authorities by the strategic housing development, SHD, finances going to them on the basis of the level of fees and level of applications that we have seen to date going through the board?

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