Ms Mary Hughes:

Deputy Murphy raised a number of issues. With regard to her observations about confusion within the system and, indeed, relating to the correlation between strategic infrastructure plans, such as the national development plan, county development plans and regional plans, the Irish Planning Institute has long been calling for publication of the Government’s planning policy statement setting out the aims and objectives of the planning system and how that can affect different provisions within different Departments. We understand from the Department that the planning policy statement is in train. We consider it quite urgent at this stage because we fundamentally believe that the work of Irish Water or of the Office of Public Works regarding flood mapping and the provision of infrastructure flood protection measures should be influenced by planning and should be aligned to the objectives of, for example, settlement strategy. Without that planning policy statement the public is not aware of the importance of planning, the objectives of the planning system and where planning and other provisions should be aligned. That is one important aspect. We agree that items such as the national development plan, the national spatial strategy and other development plans must all be in line and synchronised together.

Regarding the register of planning permissions the Deputy mentioned and the indication that they might just be retained for a period of three years, it takes a long time for a potential project to evolve. It takes a long time for it to advance through the planning system and then a long time to be implemented in terms of compliance with planning conditions and addressing certain key infrastructure. The Deputy made those points. One issue that must be seriously examined within the planning Bill, and we referred to it in our opening statement, is compliance with conditions attached to a planning permission and the length of time it is taking for planning authorities to issue compliance with those conditions. It can take anything from one month to eight months to secure compliance with planning conditions, and it is issues such as these which are an obstacle in the system to implementing development on the ground.

The Irish Planning Institute wholeheartedly supports the provisions of Part V, particularly the emphasis on the provision of social housing. There are indications that the Part V provision focusing on social housing might be reduced from 20% to 10%. Looking at the current system and at how we could potentially improve it, there are difficulties in the system in terms of reaching agreement on the level of Part V that is to be provided. There is no doubt that securing legal agreement on any development issue can take a huge amount of time. However, at present, it is quite an impediment, and it has been in the past, to delivering infrastructure projects on the ground. There must be some mechanism for negotiating Part V agreements. They must be embedded in some form of statutory timeline process to ensure that the matters can be dealt with in a timely and effective manner.

There are pros and cons as to whether the Part V proposal should be dealt with pre-planning or post-planning. There are merits in it being dealt with pre-planning from the point of view that one plans for the social housing provision as part of one’s planning application and one gets the house type and size right. However, progressing and negotiating a Part V agreement pre-planning will involve time delays. It is another bureaucratic system or process that one will have to deal with before lodging for planning. That is a time constraint in itself. If one does it post-planning permission or when the planning permission is issued, one can address the Part V issue when one is dealing with compliance with other conditions associated with one’s planning permission. There can be a time saving there. The difficulty, of course, is that it could be a case that a planning permission has been issued that is perhaps not suitable for the purposes of social housing or for the social need of that particular area.

Another issue relating to Part V that probably requires consideration is to provide more definite notice of the requirements in advance of any potential developer coming to the table. Indeed, DKM undertook a report on the Part V process and it consulted the public in that regard. One of its recommendations was that perhaps we could identify and have more clearly defined areas within development plans where a specific social housing need was required or particular housing types were required.

The objective of Part V should be to create greater clarity in the system in terms of what is provided and therefore to encourage and facilitate the process as much as possible, as opposed to becoming a burdensome issue. We have concerns about other issues and how they will be addressed, for example, if the 10% social housing is a mandatory provision, how that will be applied to smaller schemes and how it will work out. There must be some element of flexibility within the system for it to be implementable on the ground, but there is certainly no easy solution to it.

I will ask my colleagues to reply on development contributions.