James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am certainly treating the housing crisis we are in as a national emergency. That is why I am making rapid decisions in terms of what we can do to address the housing crisis and to get as many houses and apartments built as quickly as possible. I agree that planning should be before people. That is why we are reforming our planning development laws. I want to get to a situation where, when a planner looks at an application, it is not a question of why he or she should say “Yes”, but whether there is a reason to say “No”. In other words, the assumption should be that planning should be permitted. In a lot of other countries, when a development plan is done, has been through public consultation and certain areas are marked for housing, for example, it is an administrative process after that. In Ireland, however, I find the situation is like restarting the whole thing again through complex planning permission. I want to simplify the entire process.

Population caps are artificially high across the country, particularly in areas of high growth, because our existing national planning framework did not anticipate the population increases we now have. I will be writing to the local authorities in the next couple of weeks under the new national planning framework to ask them to significantly increase the amount of land they are zoning in their areas for homes. That should alleviate the situation in many of those areas where there are population caps and where people are seeing problems with planning as a result of those planning caps.

Taxation is a matter for the Minister, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, and the Department of Finance. It is not a lever I have within the Department of housing. We have done the levies exemption, which lasted for a considerable amount of time. People were aware and took advantage of it. I do not propose giving another levy exemption because I find that if you start rolling these exemptions over, they become, if you like, priced in to the system. When an exemption is provided, it has to be for a limited period of time and not repeated for a substantial time after that. I do not intend to give another levy exemption again, certainly not in the near future.