Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 21 February 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

General Scheme of the Planning and Development Bill 2022: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Kevin Kelly:

Much work has been done on that. We found at the time of the crash that there were bonds at low levels and bonds that had reached their expiry dates. A great deal of work has been done by the CCMA, and with the CIF and the Department. I expect there are higher levels of bonds in place now. There is an issue around getting open-ended bonds for developers, and that is where the cash piece comes into it. We did work a couple of years ago with all the partners with an interest in that in order to devise a time-limited bond with sufficient caveats built in to give local authorities the certainty that they would be put on notice and could call on a bond at an earlier stage in the process. Despite that work, I do not think they were taken up very much by the development sector. Following what happened, I think local authorities are hugely aware of the need to have sufficient bonding in place. That causes issues for developers in terms of getting their development in place but it is very important in protecting the public interest.