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

I will speak to the first half of the amendment on demographic projections because this is key. The most recent round of development plans, when they were done, were obviously based in part on the housing need and demand assessment. There was the ESRI study of 2019 and then the Department's HNDA exercise with its local authority targets set below that. What individual planning authorities then attempted to do, inasmuch as the HNDA allowed them to do it, was to try to apply as much of the granular detail as they could in the development of their own housing strategies. The problem, however, is that the 2019 ESRI report is only very high-level and does not provide any framework or data on a local authority, LEA or sub-LEA level, but also that there are key things it does not address. Pent-up demand is one, changing life-cycle demand is another and tenure is the other. Then there is the ability of a local authority when developing a housing strategy. They have been asked to do so without the necessary level of empirical data to give them a clear sense of, for example, what demographic projections really mean. Demographic projections do not just mean at a very macro level the overall population growth and new head count emerging in the existing population. It also deals with issues of typology, such as one-beds, two-beds, three-beds or four-beds. It deals with issues of accessibility as the population gets older, needing ground-floor rather than two-storey or upper-storey accommodation. It also needs to deal with tenure. As a consequence, those housing strategies are not worth an awful lot and we can see that work its way through in decisions that are made on planning applications.

I will give the Minister of State a real-life case because it is a good example. In my constituency, there is a site on the right-hand side of the N4 as you pass Palmerstown that is known locally as the Vincent Byrne site. It is a really good site, in my opinion, for mid-rise, high-density residential development. What it currently has, on foot of a planning application and development, is mid-rise and high-density. There is no issue with the overall shape of the development but the problem is that when that planning application was submitted and being decided on, it was to be decided against a housing strategy and plan that was completely blind to the typology, tenure and life-cycle requirements of that area. What you have is a development that has a disproportionate number of one-beds and studios and is exclusively high-end, high-cost and build-to-rent. From a proper planning point of view, the planning authority did not really have a set of tools or an ability to intervene in that planning decision, not in terms of the overall size and density but the content. It is this tension that we constantly have with these developments. There is a viability issue for the developer, who is obviously trying to work out what the maximum utility of the site is in terms of viability and profitability. That is the way they look at the world. However, the planning authority obviously has to have due regard to proper planning. In the end, what we have ended up with is a sub-optimal development, and that is in part because none of the requirements of really good and proper planning are available to the local authorities.

Some local authorities have attempted to use the housing needs demand assessment to give them a more local electoral area, or sub-local electoral area, sense of what is required.

The ESRI study the Minister of State mentioned - correct me if I am wrong - will not look at pent-up demand. Crucially, it will not look at tenure, which is very important, or life cycle housing need. Deputy Duffy made a good point on over-occupancy. One of the problems with over-occupancy is we have an ageing population living in predominantly three- and four-bedroom detached and semidetached homes. The opportunities for those homeowners to rightsize within their existing communities are virtually non-existent. Some local authorities, including South Dublin County Council, as Deputy Duffy knows, are beginning to do some rightsizing, but the numbers are small. If we look at the Vincent Byrne site, it would have been much better if an explicitly available rightsizing component had been built into the private sector housing there.

That concerns a lot more than demographic projections, but the sponsors of the amendment are trying to say to the Minister of State that the tools with which local authorities currently develop their housing development strategies are not adequate, and do not allow for a robust outline of what is required at the point of the strategy being published and the years it covers. Nothing the Minister of State said, either in reference to other sections of the Bill or the upcoming ESRI report, deals with that. While he will not accept the amendment, there is a very important point here, namely, how we properly equip and empower our local authorities to have really good housing development strategies in their development plans that will allow them to make much more nuanced planning consents, which produce what is actually needed rather than what is most optimal from the developer's point of view. I am not saying we have to ignore the developer's requirements, but they should not be what trumps it.

Another case in point, for example, is Clonliffe Road, which I will come back to, depending on the Minister of State's responses. We are tying one hand of our planning authorities behind their backs in making decisions. Planners are telling us this. They are telling us they need much more sophisticated tools to make much more sophisticated decisions. That is not covered in this section of the Bill. In fairness to the proposers of the amendment, it is at least moving in the direction of trying to address that.