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

This is a very important part of the legislation. There seems to be very little change, if any, in this section and Part of the Bill compared with what was there previously. If I am wrong, I ask the Minister of State to correct me, but it seems to be broadly a transposition. I am speaking specifically to amendment No. 895 but this is also supportive of the points Deputy O'Callaghan has just made. We often hear the argument that it is all about supply and that if we could just get the supply numbers up at a macro level, things would sort themselves out. We know that is not the case for two reasons.

The Minister will often tell us on the floor of the Dáil that we had record output at 33,000 new homes last year. Just over 8,000 of those were new build social homes, the vast majority of which were acquired by local authorities and approved housing bodies from private developers. Just about 8,000 of those were homes that went into the owner-occupier market for people to buy from estate agents. Again, just over 8,000 went into the private rental market. Even though we are meant to be seeing 11,500 homes for purchase each year and I think 6,000 homes for rental coming on stream according to the Government's housing plan, it was 8,000. Then there are about 5,000 one-off houses and about 1,000 affordable homes.

The problem is that when our planning system is making decisions about what planning applications to grant, it is completely blind to housing need. It is blind to tenure, age, life cycle, disability and income. Therefore, increasingly the decisions made on grants are so far away from housing need that we end up with the wrong kinds of homes in the wrong place at the wrong price, which creates all sorts of difficulties and challenges.

My amendment No. 895 seeks to insert a much more sophisticated local authority-led housing need demand assessment at the very centre of planned decision making. This is meant to be about plan making. This is about getting the plan-led approach right. When a planning authority is sitting down with an application for apartments, houses and duplexes, one of the things it should have in its assessment toolbox for a particular geographical area is a sense of the current housing need demand by tenure, topology, age, life cycle and disability. That is what is done in other jurisdictions, albeit not perfectly. For example, Scotland uses the housing need demand assessment at a granular level better than we do. However, we do not do that here. That means that our planning authorities are making decisions with one hand tied behind their back. A good planning authority will try to get under the bonnet of the HNDA and start trying to apply it at a more granular level, but it is not very simple and it is very challenging. Therefore, we are getting the wrong decisions on land, which is of enormous importance in meeting housing needs, and completely the wrong types of homes are being delivered.

Deputy O'Callaghan made the point about age-friendly development. I want to use this as an example. Some of our local authorities are starting to do good age-friendly development which is fine. However, surely in locations where we know there is an ageing population, particularly with private residential stock, local authorities should have either the ability if not the requirement to ensure that with new granted planning permission, private developers take account of the fact that just across the road there is a significant cohort of people many of whom would love to right-size from a private home to a different private home but stay within the parish, neighbourhood etc.

There have been previous attempts - I have spoken to some departmental officials about this - where local authorities have tried to set percentages or use very blunt tools. That is not the right approach. The right approach is to have a sophisticated granular housing need demand assessment tool which is constantly updated which planners then use in making planning applications. It should also be publicly available for those people who have a commercial or public housing interest. That is just not there at the moment. My amendment seeks to insert that.

Separately, of course, it means we need to get the housing need demand assessment tool right, which is not the case currently, not just in terms of its macro targets but also its functionality at a county, local electoral area and even DED area or small area level, which would be very helpful. If we do not fix this here in this Bill, when will it get fixed? When will we have a planning system that makes decisions based on actual objective assessment of need rather than solely on the basis of what a particular private developer thinks is commercially viable?

I am not saying to disregard what is commercially viable but there is not enough of a consideration of actual need. Too much of it is still developer-led. We can have all the great plans we want but if we do not have a tool for making decisions embedded in the housing strategy and then, in turn, impacting on grants of planning as per previous parts of the Bill, I think we are on a hiding to nothing.