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

I am surprised that amendment No. 187 is in this grouping rather than a later one. I will not question the Bills Office but this amendment is on a separate matter. It relates to section 23, which is on national planning statements, on which we will have a discussion later.

One of the key issues that arose during pre-legislative scrutiny was that national planning statements are very important. I am absolutely not against the idea of them in principle. I believe Government should have the right to set national planning policy. I made the case in pre-legislative scrutiny and again in a discussion on a related amendment with the Minister of State, Deputy Kieran O'Donnell that there needed to be clarity in the law on what is the responsibility of central government and the subsidiarity principles to apply to the regional and local authorities.

For two reasons, and this directly relates to this amendment, I believe there needs to be a better process for the approval of the national planning policy statements, as they are called. As the Minister will know, for example with exempted development regulations, there is a standard procedure, which is that a motion goes to the Dáil and exempted development proposals are referred to this committee. There is usually very constructive and healthy discussion on the content of those. Sometimes amendments are suggested and these are taken on board by the Government, most recently with regard to some exempted development amendments introduced by the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell. Then, when the committee has dispensed with its scrutiny, a motion goes back to the Dáil and the regulation proceeds.

Given that these national planning statements are effectively a form of law, they have a statutory impact, and given that they are to replace the section 28 ministerial guidelines, which have been subject to significant legal challenge and in most, if not all, cases, have been found to be on the wrong side of those legal challenges, there appears to be value in having some formulation of the amendment that I have proposed. There would be a real value, both from a public awareness point of view and a practical point of view, to have some formal Oireachtas scrutiny and some formal mechanism for the Oireachtas to go through these policy statements and guidelines in a more thorough way than is provided for in the legislation. Ultimately, these policy statements should be approved by the Oireachtas because they should have the force and democratic legitimacy of the Oireachtas. That would make them better and they would enjoy greater public confidence.

It would also mean that they would be much more robust to any future challenges. The Minister can see what I am trying to do here in pursuance of a national planning policy statement. I am proposing that the Minister should bring a motion before the Houses of the Oireachtas and that it should be referred to the relevant committees, that officials and, if necessary, other relevant persons should come before those committee, that it should be possible to make amendments the national planning policy and that the statements should be referred back to the Houses for approval.

I will make one practical suggestion. Whatever about our disagreements in the past, an area that the Minister and I agree on now is that of co-living. As he knows, co-living was brought in by means of a section 28 ministerial guideline, which was the predecessor of what we are discussing. When they were being developed, those guidelines were very technical in nature. The public submissions were generally from architects, planners and people involved in the development process at various stages. There was no real public or Oireachtas scrutiny of them until after they had been published and, effectively, had the force of law. The Minister spoke out about them and I did too. Ultimately, the Minister changed the regulations and co-living is no longer permissible within our planning code. If we had had a process something like what is outlined here back when the Minister and I were both on this side of the House, I wonder if we could have avoided many of the problems in the planning system with apartment developments, as well as with public confidence in that system, if that section 28 ministerial guideline on apartment design standards had been the subject of a process like this. What we are doing represents a genuine attempt to try to make the process of agreeing national planning policy statements more robust from a policy, public confidence and, ultimately, legal perspective.

I am firmly of the view that anything which effectively has the force of statute should have the imprimatur of the Houses of the Oireachtas, subject to scrutiny by a committee. It is not giving them the full status of legislation and having a full legislative process, but something much more efficient with respect to how this matter is dealt with. I do not imagine that this would take much longer than, for example, the current process relating to proposed changes to exempted developments in the sense that, typically, this takes a couple of weeks to move through both Houses of the Oireachtas. What is being done here might take a little longer, but it would be nowhere near as long proceeding by means of legislation.