Mr. Robin Mandal:

The Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance, DDPA, is grateful for the opportunity to discuss this important legislation with the committee today. It will shape our future. The legislators' input is crucial for ensuring it is fit for purpose. We hope we can be of some assistance to bring the perspective of ordinary people who live with results of planning decisions. I am accompanied by Ms Pauline Cadell, an active participant Dublin's north inner city and Clíona Kimber who contributes on climate and biodiversity. She is a lawyer and will not be here until after the courts finish work. Ms Cadell is looking after a rescue dog and will need to leave about an hour after Ms Kimber arrives.

The executive selected me to appear both as chair of the DDPA and as an architect engaged with the planning systems from the 1993 Act up to the 2000 Act with all the amendments and accompanying statutory instruments from 1964 onwards. I have worked on these for nearly half a century and hope to bring some level of insight into how this might help. We have provided a briefing document with appendices that address all the issues we raised in our submission. We hope this is of help to the committee.

The Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance is an alliance of civic groups such as the Rathmines Planning Initiative and District 7. We have more than 75 residents’ associations, planning and housing specialists, architects, statisticians, academics and ordinary citizens. We seek to ensure that citizens are at the centre of planning and that their voices are heard and listened to on the bedrock of subsidiarity, as is the norm in Europe. Since 2015, this has not been the case in Ireland. In recent years, we have been working to counteract the loss of trust in the planning system and to promote sustainable development, democratic planning and affordable housing. Our collaborative workshop of November last shows how engagement can work. It forms part of our appendices.

The DDPA welcomes the Bill, which aims to consolidate planning legislation into a clear, concise code. We had hoped for simplicity, but do not see that yet. We welcome the Bill where it strengthens the certainty, consistency and efficient timelines of outcomes in planning decisions for all. Failure to produce these results has led to many of the real and perceived problems with our planning system. We reserve our welcome to the top-down policy-driven agenda until we are certain that a corresponding bottom-up agenda is integrated into the Bill.

We would like to see the balance between policy-givers and policy-takers recalibrated so that local government might be re-empowered. As an aside, local government has served this country well both as a voice for the citizen and as a nursery ground for our public and national representatives. These things matter. The DDPA has concerns that the Bill will have unintended consequences from unthought-out or ill-considered changes that diminish the power of individuals, local representatives, and local authorities through more centralisation. There is little explanation as to the rationale for these changes; and there appears to be no analyses of any empiric data to drive them.

We also have concerns that the planning process has failed due to the adversarial nature of planning as it has developed in the past few years. We hope that the Bill will signal a move towards a consensual approach to planning and development control that is primarily driven by the needs of the citizens. Unfortunately, we see the further exclusion of the citizen combined with the strengthening of centralised power as a threat not just to the rule of law and the separation of powers but also to democracy itself, which we feel could lead to social instability. We are also concerned about the false narratives driving some of the Bill's provisions, such as the idea that objections stop development, which is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. As the members all know, observations are part of the planning system and have no impact on local authority timelines. Appeals to An Bord Pleanála do add time, but nobody is suggesting that this right be withdrawn as it was in respect of strategic housing development, SHD, with predictable results. However, even within the An Bord Pleanála process, observations also have no impact on timelines. Some would say they have no impact at all one way or the other but I disagree with that.

I will move on to the issue of judicial review, on which I do not want to spend very much time. It is important to say that while judicial review may delay a decision, the solution is not to restrict rights of access but to make robust decisions based on agreed development plans. While devastating for the individual developer, the extent of judicial review has to be put into perspective. Of the 265,000 planning decisions made in the past decade, a total of 490 An Bord Pleanála decisions have been taken to judicial review. These do not even come up in my pie graphs as data as all. It is a very small number. I accept that they are very important for those against whom they are taken. Nearly half of these have been in the past three years, due to SHD and material contraventions directed by ministerial specific planning policy requirements, SPPRs. We fear the continuation of that method.

The SHD figures themselves are illuminating. In spite of the 12,000 homes currently under review and the 11,000 quashed or conceded, there are still 54,000 homes with granted permissions. There are a further 32,000 homes submitted under fast-track SHD long overdue for decision by An Bord Pleanála. Similarly, the notion that planning is holding up the delivery of housing is untrue; it never was. At present in the Dublin area alone, there are unused permissions for more than 49,000 homes.

We are also concerned that the roles of the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR, An Bord Pleanála and the future commission as independent entities will not survive this Bill. Ministerial diktat has undermined them already. We are somewhat concerned at what we see as mission creep in the OPR, compared to the core recommendations in the Mahon tribunal report, particularly those on page 2,563.

Finally, the DDPA hopes that the Bill will provide clarity, certainty, transparency, accessibility, and consistency. In this, the citizen, the planner, the developer, the architect and the State are all on the same page. As it stands, the Bill in front of us will provide none of these. It is up to the Deputies and Senators to craft it so that it does.