Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

Notwithstanding the need for belated reform, I was shocked by the content of the legislation because of its command and control nature in what is proposed as a new planning and development framework. I do not deny for a minute the need for a new framework, the need to learn from mistakes of the past, to prevent the recurrence of the abuses of the past, to equip the planning authorities to deal with very different problems and to equip the planning authorities to face the challenges of the future. I do not pretend that finding a new planning framework is easy - it is not easy to find one that will meet with universal approval. Our history, our near obsessive devotion to land and property and our inbuilt expectation of capital appreciation in property, passed down from generation to generation, combine to create resistance to change and generate strong and varying views on what constitutes good planning.

As a member of the local authority, I used to think I had seen it all but it was not until I came to this House and met rural Deputies that I realised the difference between what is considered good planning in Dublin and what is considered good planning in rural Ireland. What Dublin considers utterly reprehensible is considered good planning in the country and vice versa. Within council areas there are often differing views on what constitutes good planning. Some believe the emphasis should be on jobs, social gain and community gain while others believe the environment is all-important. The battle is over which should take priority. Is good planning more important than the other considerations or is helping jobs, people and communities more important? The truth is that any settlement policy will involve compromises. If we had no people we could have a sustainable environment because there would be very little degradation of the environment. However, we do have people so the objective must be to find the least unsustainable policy.

Whatever the difficulties, the solution is not to have ministerial micromanagement of every local area plan and development plan. This is what the legislation effectively suggests. This goes against the concept of subsidiarity and everything the Government says it aspires to for local government. It goes against the concept of devolution and self-government and, most of all, it is contrary to everything the Green Party has said about local government even though this Bill is published by a Green Party Minister.

The Green Party has always promoted the reverse of these measures. The Green Party wanted local government at the micro level and at local authority meetings I have often heard them refer to local government at street level, the concept of the self-sufficient commune. Such control from the Minister is a million miles from that concept. Where does the new departure, of centralising the most basic local decisions at Government level in the hands of the Minister of the day, come from? I do not understand how this could come from a Green Party Minister who has always articulated different ideas. What arrogance would make a Minister think he can know enough about every single local authority, the local conditions and circumstances in order to dictate a better future for every hamlet throughout the country? Perhaps the current Minister knows enough and I would not criticise him. Even if he does know enough to do a good job for everyone, could the same be said for every Minister with responsibility for the environment we have ever had? Would the current Minister want those past Ministers to have had absolute power as he suggests for himself? Is he confident it is a good idea to give the power to Ministers in the future?

I agree with the Minister that we must have a settlement hierarchy and that national plans and regional plans must be broadly consistent with the local development plans and local area plans. It is a great leap from that point to saying that it can only be achieved by having county managers make local draft development plans, which can only be amended by the Minister of the day. It makes a complete nonsense of local government and devalues local knowledge and aspirations as well as the input that only local people can have. It is impossible to know local conditions and to understand the dynamics of the local area or a town, no matter how wonderful the Minister. It is a complex social, historical and cultural issue. The best governed countries in the world have the best and strongest local government.

The Minister refers to consultation at pre-drafting stage. The Acting Chairman was a member of a local authority and he knows what the public thinks of local consultation. Regardless of how well-meaning the concept of local consultation is, as far as the public is concerned it is a farce, in effect, in terms of bringing about change in the concept or principle of what is being proposed. People feel that it might change the detail, but will not change the principle. Rightly or wrongly, the public regards the whole public consultation process - what used to be Part 10 but is now Part 8 - as a means for bureaucrats to tell the public what they plan to do anyway. The existence of a process of public consultation will not help to bring about much change.

God knows the local authorities have made mistakes in their planning. I confess I made such errors in the past. Many of those mistakes were largely due to the complete absence of a national spatial vision. The Minister was right in what he said in that regard. The national spatial strategy was eventually produced quite late in the Celtic tiger cycle, unfortunately. It was really a joke of a plan. Everyone knew it was hugely political. It had something for everybody in the audience. There was not a hamlet in the county that was not going to be developed. As the plan was based on a scattergun approach, it produced scattergun development. Such development escalated after the publication of the national spatial strategy. The then Minister agreed a plan that encouraged the kind of development that we are now saying must never be allowed to happen again, as it has caused so many problems.

The amazing thing is that the Green Party criticised the national spatial strategy when it was published, but it is now proposing a new framework that is based on coherence between the national spatial strategy, which is hugely flawed, and all other plans. That does not make sense to me. If the Minister is to pursue this framework, I plead with him to revisit the national spatial strategy. Having produced a hugely flawed strategy, the Government went on to ignore it completely. The only good aspect of it was the provision for certain urban areas to be designated as gateways or hubs of development that would support the local network of towns, villages and the rural countryside. It was planned to locate the main supporting infrastructure - the large hospitals, libraries, water works, buildings, development and transport facilities - in the gateways, but that never happened. The investment made during the Celtic tiger years was not focused on the gateways - it was based on a scattergun approach. The gateways did not get priority investment. There was never any hope that the hubs which were originally envisaged to give communities the support they required would be developed. The reality is that it will not now happen in this generation.

I wish to speak about the regional planning guidelines that were given to local authorities in poor old Dublin. Deputy Cuffe spoke about the guidelines in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. I was a member of that authority when the Dublin local authorities were asked to build houses to meet the population targets that had been set for them. The authorities were promised that if they did so, suitable infrastructural investment in schools, buses, sports facilities, hospitals, libraries and other necessary facilities would follow from the Government in support of new communities. Communities throughout Dublin are suffering because that never materialised. Young people have to travel ten or 15 miles from their communities to go to school in the city centre. Secondary schools are a precious commodity in my constituency. Primary schools were promised, but some children are lucky to have prefabs. In some cases, they do not even have prefabs. Little kids are travelling out of the community to get places in primary schools. The facilities that were promised are not coming. The development levies that might have been gathered are not materialising. Many of the levies pertaining to existing developments will not be paid and there will be no new developments for some years to come. Many communities have been completely abandoned.

Consistency is a two-way process. If we want local authority plans to be consistent with national plans, the Government must follow through on its national plans by investing the necessary funds, which should be funnelled to where they were promised. There will be no incentive for local authority plans to be consistent with a national spatial strategy if the latter strategy is not being implemented. The Government's failure to meet its obligations made local authorities try to do what they could on their own. I have spoken to many councillors throughout the country who saw it as their obligation to try to save their local areas because nobody else was doing it. When every authority works on its own, there is no consistency and no coherence. That is what gave us bad planning. It was Government policy to allow the construction of hotels in God-forsaken places. They never had any chance of being sustainable. When one drives around the country, it is tragic to see housing estates that were built on the edges of old villages. In some cases, the estate is capable of housing three times the original population of the village. There was never any reason for the local population to grow in a manner that would produce sufficient demand for such houses. It is a tragedy and a classic example of how not to develop rural areas.

If there is no coherence between the various plans, there is no incentive for local authorities to follow the national plan. Many councillors have started to see national plans as having no reality beyond the day they are announced with great fanfare in Dublin. To put it quite simply, population and jobs will follow the infrastructure. If there is no infrastructure, who can blame rudderless local authorities for doing what they see as the best thing for their local areas? I agree with the section of the Bill that calls for consistency with transport plans. No development should take place anywhere in the country unless there is a clear transport plan for that area. Climate change has made that critical. The transport plans that have been presented never came to pass, however. Transport 21, which has been largely abandoned, did not have more than patchy coherence across the country. According to the national spatial strategy, by contrast, almost every town in the country was to be developed. I do not disagree with what the Minister wants to achieve, but I disagree with any effort to try to achieve it by diktat.

The major flaw in his approach is that we do not know whether the required consistency between ministerial plans and ministerial actions will exist. The Government ignored the national spatial strategy it produced. If this Bill is to mean anything, the spatial strategy will have to be revised and implemented. One of my big problems with this legislation is that its whole tone is contrary to the objective of strengthening local government and transparency. I do not think any Minister, regardless of who he or she is, should dictate what happens at local level. When a national plan has been put in place, one should expect local authorities to comply with it. Indeed, sanctions can be put in place to ensure that happens.

I would like to mention a couple of other issues. I do not want to be completely negative because I support certain aspects of this Bill, such as those allowing for the extension of planning permission and for greater clarity about the taking in charge of estates. I am not happy about the idea of allowing local authorities to impose levies so that schools are provided. When newly married couples buy their first house, they should not have to pay for schools to be constructed. That is what this provision involves, in effect. I am aware of hapless people in my local area who bought apartments and are now in negative equity with no local facilities. They overpaid for their properties because developers felt they would have to pay development levies. Those levies were not paid, in many cases. Some of them were paid, but many of them will never be paid. The developers in question are with NAMA now, or will be shortly. I do not believe these levies should be extended to schools. If there is one thing kids are entitled to, it is a school and I think the State should provide it. In any event, levies are a discredited currency at local level. They played a part in the uncontrolled building frenzy and were ultimately paid by the hapless house buyers.

I would like to raise some other aspects of the Bill in the few minutes remaining to me. I have written to the Minister about Part V housing being built in areas that are separate to the developments for which planning permission is being sought. There is no transparency in that regard. The Minister acknowledged my letter and assured me he would respond to the issues in advance of the publication of this Bill but as I have heard nothing further, I ask him to respond. The lack of transparency is contrary to the notion that people should be involved in the planning process and be aware of what was happening in their areas. People purchased houses in what they assumed were private developments only to discover subsequently that they were surrounded by public housing. I support completely the Part V provisions and it is perfectly acceptable that the proportion of housing constructed in my area under that Part was 20% but when the proportion increases to 40% or 60% the intention of the provisions are unacceptably undermined.

Anybody living in an urban area would be aware of the increasing problem of oversize trees in urban gardens. Where people live in close proximity, some sort of control is needed over trees. They can cause more damage than walls or buildings because they keep growing. If I may be excused the pun, this is an old chestnut. I ask the Minister to follow the example of most other countries by introducing some form of regulation. One must take account of loss of sunlight as well as the potential damage to adjoining buildings.

In the context of the property collapse, it is urgent that some way be found to complete estates and other developments which were intended to be operated by management companies. In some cases, lifts and staircase were operated by management companies while open areas were to be taken in charge by local authorities. Other developments were to be managed entirely by management companies but many have not yet been completed by developers. It was previously assumed that a bond would cover completion of such developments but it has since emerged that local authorities are not entitled to seek bonds to guarantee completion. The fall-out is that nobody is responsible for completing developments or finishing paths and landscaping. The law as it stands appears to place the new owners of these developments in breach of planning permission. I am not sure whether NAMA will assume the obligations of the planning permission when it takes over some of these developments.

See this speech in context