Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats)
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Earlier this week, we discussed the issue of viability with other organisations. A suggestion made by one of the groups that was involved in building homes - not at the speculative end - was that it would be a good idea to include an economic viability assessment as part of the planning process to ensure a project was viable and not just being pursued for speculative or other reasons. I do not know if that is the exact answer, but there is an issue with the planning process sometimes being used for speculation. The incidence has increased in recent years. Uncertainty allows that. The more the system is plan led, the less one can speculate. If it is clear from the plan there will be 100 homes on a piece of land, one cannot engage in speculative planning by trying to increase that to 200 and then flipping the site. This is one of the values of a strong plan-led approach.

Trying to reduce some of that speculative activism in planning would be beneficial all round, including to the people who are engaged in the planning process only to build homes and infrastructure and who find such speculation and the resource and time delays it causes for everybody else frustrating. I appreciate there are other measures on that such as trying to prevent hoarding and all the rest, but it is something that should at least be seriously considered in a review of planning and we need to see if something can be built in at that stage which tries to address that. The point was made that economic viability assessments have been done in the planning process in other countries and they have been successful.