Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

When making the decisions in the Rebuilding Ireland strategy, we looked at the process of building a house and looked at the levers that are controlled by the Government, by local government and by me. We looked at the obvious things that we could change. We know, for example, that 15 planning applications for more than 100 houses have been submitted to An Bord Pleanála this year. We know that the time period from concept to final decision was 78 weeks on average, with many of the planning applications taking longer than that. It did not take a genius to conclude that maybe we should take a look at streamlining the system, and that is what we have done.

Likewise, we looked at the cost of development levies on many of the sites. There is enough planning permission currently in Dublin for 27,000 houses, but only 4,000 are under construction. When one speaks to people about why construction is not happening they speak about a series of costs. One of those costs is the cost of infrastructure to open up the land for development, so we targeted that issue with the LIHAF fund.

This is a practical response to practical blockages in the system as opposed to being a formal audit. I am happy to share and discuss this. We have had a lot of discussion in the committee on many of these issues already.

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