Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. I wish to deal with a number of issues in the legislation, which I am very happy to see introduced at this stage. The key features of the legislation are the introduction of a requirement for an evidence-based system to ensure greater coherence between county development plans, the housing strategy with the regional planning guidelines and the national spatial strategy. I shall return to that point shortly. The Bill provides for more synergies between these various plans, including local area plans, particularly in so far as zoning of land is concerned. I support the provisions changing the rules for the making or variation of a development plan or local area plan, which will require the support of two thirds of the total number of members of the planning authority instead of a simple majority at present. The Bill provides that only minor amendments will be permitted to draft development plans or local area plans which have been the subject of public consultation.

Ministerial guidelines will have greater legal force and I will deal with that in greater detail. I am Chairman of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, which completed a detailed report on the matter. It has been quoted extensively and it has contributed to an improvement in this legislation as a result of the recommendations that I, as Chairman of the committee, would have brought forward with the committee some time ago, especially following the issue with the Mayo county development plan. A section of the Bill strengthens the powers of local authorities to refuse planning permission to applicants who have been convicted of serious breaches of planning legislation. Improvements will be made to effectiveness, including the use of e-planning. Local authorities will have greater flexibility regarding the distribution of existing development levies.

The legislation essentially boils down to the one issue of greater synergies between the national spatial strategy, regional planning guidelines, county development plans and local area plans. While I support the general principle, I wish to highlight a number of issues of particular concern in that regard. I am about to make a controversial statement. At a recent meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government representatives of An Bord Pleanála brought to our attention that there are approximately 88 planning authorities between city councils, county councils and urban councils, which is wrong. It is far too many. Many of the counties should have only one. Some urban councils within modestly sized counties are individual planning authorities in their own right. It is impossible for the senior planners in those areas to have the breadth of experience necessary to deal with a complicated planning application if it happened to come their way. Given the limited number of planning applications that go through some planning authorities, some of them may never have any cases going to An Bord Pleanála and so are not gaining benefit from the interaction of having some of their cases being reviewed and adjudicated by an inspector from An Bord Pleanála and, ultimately, a judgment from the board.

The An Bord Pleanála annual report produced the figures for appeals on a county-by-county basis. It has promised to supply information in respect of each planning authority. I was shocked to hear there were 88, which is wrong from a planning point of view. It results in too much fragmentation and it would not be possible to have the required skills base. It is wrong for the urban council of a town of 10,000 people to be a planning authority. An area should have a minimum population of 20,000 to 30,000 before justifying a planning authority. While I know some people will disagree with me, I believe it would lead to more coherence.

Most of the Bill's provisions hinge on the national spatial strategy. As a Deputy representing the Laois-Offaly constituency and primarily representing County Laois, I have a fundamental problem with the national spatial strategy. County Laois hardly featured in that document. I believe it made its way into one half-sentence in the entire book. I made a submission when it was being prepared in 2000-01. The national spatial strategy is seriously out of date. It was published in 2002, long before the economic boom or major increases in population. The Ireland of today is fundamentally different from when the strategy was drafted almost ten years ago. It now needs to be reconsidered. Some areas were not adequately dealt with.

I recall the submission I made at that time. I live in County Laois, which is part of the greater Leinster area, less than 50 miles from Dublin. All development in such areas - Kildare, Carlow, Wicklow, Meath, Louth or Laois - is related to the greater Dublin area. Many people in Laois commute to Dublin every day and many people from Dublin have come to live in Laois. I asked that we be included in the eastern midlands area or be more integrated with the east coast, but when the national spatial strategy was issued we were lumped in with Longford, Westmeath and Offaly. They are lovely counties, but there is zero synergy between Counties Laois and Longford. Nobody commutes or travels to shop from the Longford-Westmeath area to County Laois or vice versa. It makes no sense that we are tied into this area under the national spatial strategy. There are probably historical links through health boards or something similar. However, Laois, as a county, has much more affinity and synergy with the counties to the east of it, such as Kildare, Carlow and Dublin.

The national spatial strategy needs to be re-examined because it is now almost ten years out of date. I would like to see the Minister comment on this at some stage during the passage of the legislation. Regional guidelines should not be formed from a national spatial strategy that is out of date.

One of the problems with the national spatial strategy was that it was an attempt at social engineering. There is such a thing as economic gravity. People in Laois gravitate to Dublin, but the national spatial strategy said we should gravitate to Lanesborough in Longford. It does not make sense. It was an attempt to keep populations in certain areas and reduce the expansion of the greater Dublin area. However, if we know anything about world populations it is that they tend to gravitate towards the major population centres. This is the case in Leinster, but the same applies in Munster; people from outside the cities gravitate to Cork or Limerick. To try to create a gravitational pull towards an artificially created region makes no sense and it should not be the basis for regional planning guidelines in the future.

Laois is also part of the BMW region. There is zero synergy between Laois and Donegal, Mayo or Monaghan. We should not be in the BMW region; it makes no logical sense. It was set up to help draw down funding from the EU for a particular purpose several years ago. That is the only reason that region exists and I do not see any practical benefit from it. Such things should be reconsidered.

I mentioned earlier the issue of ministerial directions. There is a special section in the Bill changing the way these are handled when an amendment or variation to a county development plan is sought. The Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government had a meeting with representatives of Mayo County Council who were not happy with the procedures that were carried out with regard to their county development plan. This also happened in my county in 2006 when there was an element of over-zoning by local council members. Local councillors are not the best people to decide on zoning of local land. When a request comes in to a local authority about zoning of land, many councillors, if they are honest, will admit that they first ask whose land it is rather than where it is or what it will be used for. Most Deputies here who have been members of local authorities will know this question is asked by local councillors every day and is an influence on their decisions.

I said at a conference more than a year ago that there must be some new mechanism for zoning land whereby a simple majority is insufficient. I proposed a double-lock mechanism under which the county manager and the majority of members would have to agree. What is being proposed here is that there must be a two-thirds majority for rezoning decisions, which is good because it means the party that controls the council by a simple majority cannot make such decisions unilaterally and, in some cases, in spite of professional advice to the contrary. I am not saying professionals are always right, but neither is it right that such decisions can be made by a simple majority. The proposed system is more democratic and gives a say to a greater number of people. I consider it an enhancement of local democracy, which needs to be pursued.

What the committee stated in its report, which has been made available to Deputies here, is that the problem is that under the current law, if a Minister is not happy with a completed development plan, the next step is a directive, out of the blue, to the local authority, with no consultation or discussion. We made a recommendation that there should be a consultation period and the Minister should first issue a draft directive, obtaining submissions from the local authority and other interested parties. The Minister should have an absolute right in legislation, as a representative of the national Parliament - because we are a relatively small country - to force local authorities to make changes to their county development plans. However, under the existing legislation the process is weak and faulty. I am pleased the Minister has considered the recommendations of the joint committee in that regard. Our meeting with the Mayo councillors was attended by about 35 Members of the Oireachtas, which shows that the issue has exercised the minds of many people. This represents an improvement of procedures that are not adequate under the existing legislation.

The issue of housing strategies is pertinent to this legislation and was mentioned by previous speakers. I ask the Minister, for Committee and Report Stages, to reconsider such issues. The majority of local authorities were not committed to the concept of a housing strategy and asked consultants to prepare reports. The only outcome in which the local authority was interested was what percentage of Part V houses it would get from particular developers for affordable or social housing. The concentration of housing strategies in most counties is geared towards waiting lists for council houses. In most counties or cities local authority housing represents about 5% of the total housing stock - certainly not as much as 10%. In most housing strategies the local authority's housing needs had an undue influence and the vast array of private houses being provided were not considered.

I would like to see an amendment to the Bill dealing with affordable housing. There is a serious problem in this area. The people who dreamt up the concept of affordable housing had an excellent idea, but they only considered it on the basis of prices rising; they never considered that prices could fall. The legislation in this area states that the price paid by a local authority for an affordable house is the actual cost of construction plus a profit margin for the builder, which can be up to 15%. In my local authority the price being paid on this basis is more than the market value. Affordable houses, believe it or not, are on sale in County Laois for €150,000 but the market value for better houses in a neighbouring estate is about €125,000.

We are in the perverse situation, because of falling prices, that affordable houses are costing local authorities more than their open market value. It was never considered that prices would drop. I have heard this from builders and they are laughing. They say they are being paid more than the market value for these houses, but if the housing officer has a problem with what they are saying they will win because the legislation states that the price should be the cost of building plus a margin for profit. House values have fallen below the sum of cost plus profit; many houses are being sold for less than this. That is something that has come to pass in recent times and the legislation should deal with it by changing the formula for pricing.

There has been much mention of planning and the planners. It is easy to dump on An Bord Pleanála, but I am always a great believer in bodies like An Bord Pleanála and the Office of the Ombudsman because I do not believe that front-line staff, whether in social welfare, housing, the tax office, the HSE or planning offices, should have the ultimate say on anything. There always must be a court of appeal like An Bord Pleanála. We may not always like what An Bord Pleanála does but we would be in a fair worse situation if we did not have it in operation.

The problem with many of the house designs, which is a big issue in rural areas, is that practically all of the planners who are on the front line making decisions across the country have been trained in the UK. Many of them are Irish, but they went to the UK and most of them got their training over there. They have a UK urban-orientated mind-set on proper planning. The Department is continually having to send out manuals about rural housing and such issues.

On rural housing, I was born and reared, and have lived all my life, in a rural area in County Laois. I do not live in a town and I am all in favour of that. The main reason we have a problem with so many people wanting to build individual houses in rural areas is because the Government consistently over the decades refused to provide funding for waste water sewerage schemes in the villages and small towns. There are at least 12 villages without a sewerage scheme in County Laois. It is impossible for anybody to get planning permission in one of those village because one needs sufficient area coverage for percolation and the only option is to buy a field from a farmer out the road, leading to ribbon development. The principle reason we have had so much one-off rural housing is that we were not providing the ability to build houses in villages. What happened in every village during the boom was that if a developer built 100 houses, he would put in a sewerage scheme. It was the only way some villages ever got such a scheme in the past ten years.

My single biggest criticism of Governments over the past generation has been their refusal to provide adequate funding for waste water. Much money has been allocated to provided public water supplies and we can even see that the grant for a water scheme for a group of houses is substantial - I am not sure whether it is €6,000 or €8,000. There is on paper a grant for individual sewerage schemes, but it does not get drawn down often because it is so complex to do so. In addition, there are many towns where people cannot get planning permission at present because the sewerage systems are at full capacity.

Deputy Bannon stated he could speak all night, but I will not do so. Most Deputies have a keen interest in this area. I am pleased with the provisions in the Bill dealing with the taking charge of estates, especially where the majority of people in an area want that done. There is also provision in this legislation to deal with situations where there is a majority of multi-unit owners. This follows the recommendation from the Law Reform Commission on the taking in charge of those areas.

I am pleased with the issue of e-planning. When a person gets a receipt from a local authority or An Bord Pleanála he or she should be able to accept a copy of that receipt by electronic means. The board refuses many applications because the person cannot produce the individual receipt.

The European Court of Justice made decisions as a result of the Lemybrien case it dealt with last year where it stated that if an environmental impact assessment was required in relation to retention of a particular development, no planning could ever be granted because one could not do an assessment. This would be because the scheme, or what had happened so far, was so big one could never assess what was the original environmental situation for the purpose of drawing up a proper EIA. This applies to a few quarries and sandpits around the country which have been caught in this quango situation. I hope the Minister will bring forward transitional recommendations on Committee Stage to deal with those developments caught temporarily in this situation.

As Chairman of the Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, I look forward to the Bill coming before us in due course and to it passing through the Oireachtas in the coming weeks.

See this speech in context