Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I echo the comments that have just been made by Deputy Boyd Barrett. Nothing more true has been said about housing in this House in the past seven or eight years. The regressive and retrograde decision to abandon large local authority development in the mid-1990s was made on spurious grounds of design etc. The Minister will agree that there are many examples of beautiful and incredibly sustainable local authority areas and estates in his city of Cork and my city of Dublin. If previous Governments and our local authority predecessors were able to do that in the past, it should be possible for us to do it again.

I am delighted to have an opportunity to speak briefly on the Planning and Development (Housing) and Residential Tenancies Bill 2016. I fully agree that major initiatives are urgently needed to increase housing output vastly and address our deepening housing and homelessness catastrophe. I do not believe this Bill is one of those initiatives. I asked the Minister in recent parliamentary questions to resource local authorities to enable them to build directly. I remind him that whole local authority departments of skilled planning and construction professionals were depleted, if not wiped out, over the past 20 years. The Government has done almost nothing about this. The Bill before the House is a further continuation of the old failed rip-off system that was led by private developers. I recognise that the Minister is sincerely aware of the depths of this crisis and the need for urgent and dramatic action. I have called for a FEMPI-type response to this crisis on many occasions. We saw on the financial side that this kind of response involves very direct action. This House was prepared to take ruthless action in relation to the banks and public sector pay etc. but it does not remotely seem to have the same inclination in relation to housing.

Although I agree that the planning process could be expedited at different stages, I believe it is absolutely unnecessary to eviscerate the powers of local authorities in the manner set out in this legislation. I remind the Minister that up to 100,000 housing units were built each year between 2004 and 2008. The exact housing figures were 68,819 in 2004, 76,954 in 2005, 80,954 in 2006, 93,419 in 2007, 78,027 in 2008 and in 51,724 in 2009. We were able to turn out housing in such massive numbers under the system that is currently in place. Vast new urban districts were built under the existing Planning and Development Act 2000. Large developments were built in my own constituency of Dublin Bay North even though it was not a strategic development zone. I understand there are existing permissions to built 27,000 homes in Dublin alone. This would exceed the basic annual output for which the Minister is aiming. I understand that enough land has been zoned as residential across Ireland to facilitate the construction of 414,000 homes. Why are these homes not being built? That is the fundamental point. A total of 17,434 hectares of land is zoned as residential across the country. Some 2,654 hectares of this, or over 5,000 acres, is in the Dublin area. This land could be used to provide 116,700 urgently needed homes.

This legislation will do nothing to address the problem of our total reliance on the failed speculative bank-and-developer system. We know that land hoarding is still a huge problem. When I look at some estates that are being built at the moment, I am reminded of the construction of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages or the Great Wall of China. It seems to be going on and on. I wonder why this is the case. Is it a question of a lack of finance? Are developers deliberately holding and hoarding in the knowledge that the housing crisis will be even worse next year and the following year and prices will continue to escalate? Many planning permissions have been granted in the local authority areas I represent - Dublin city and Fingal - in the past two or three years, but we are still waiting for the homes. Bankrupt developers are working their way back with the help of NAMA. The Government is now calling on developers who left us with messes like Priory Hall and Longboat Quay, with pyrite-ridden homes and with fire traps to come to the rescue in addressing the housing crisis as it spirals out of control. The dysfunctional bank-and-developer financial model that has been driving our housing market has been overseen by the Central Bank, which has been equally dysfunctional at times. Like other Deputies, I have complained month after month over the past year and a half on behalf of constituents that action needs to be taken on the macroprudential rules. The Governor of the Central Bank, Mr. Lane, did not see fit to come forward with minor positive moves to try to relax those rules until the past week.

On the positive side, I accept that the Bill includes a few small improvements for tenants. Unfortunately, it does not really make an effort to address the real power of landlords and property owners. Section 4 of the Bill provides for the streamlined planning processes that will apply to strategic housing developments, which are defined in the Bill as developments of more than 100 homes or developments of student accommodation with 200 or more bed spaces. Although this streamlining is due to expire in October 2019, the Minister has said that it could continue until December 2021 as a result of a Seanad amendment. If these changes are deemed to be necessary, why is the Minister placing time limits on them? I suggest that the Minister could have considered taking the opposite approach by leaving the key invigilation and decision process with the local authorities that know their own areas best and by greatly reducing the times permitted for the appeals process.

Surely local planners, elected representatives who make third party submissions and the various civil society groups and residents' associations etc. are best placed to assess proposed major developments and to decide what is best for local areas. I would like to refer in this context to one of the many large developments that have been proposed in my constituency recently. I believe the residents of the receiving environment and the Dublin City Council planners are best placed to decide on what constitutes a sustainable development for the site in question, which is on the grounds of St. Paul's College near St. Anne's Park. I remind the House that there are 6,500 people on the homeless and housing list in my constituency. Urgent action is needed for that reason. The effect of this legislation will be to ban third party submissions regarding large developments at local level.

The Minister said in the Seanad and again in this House that under the process that is being created, the chief executives of local authorities will be able to have an input by making submissions. This will differ significantly from the current situation, which permits interested citizens to make submissions immediately. The Minister might recall that when many houses were being constructed in the 2000s, as I have mentioned, people had eight weeks to make submissions in the first stage of the local authority process. This was reduced to five weeks as part of a previous attempt to streamline the process.

In my experience, much information is often missing from the original proposals and, when additional information is required, it is usually the developer's fault. In the past two to three years, there have been many time-wasting reapplications by developers, seeking either fairly minor amendments or to increase the number of houses compared to apartments, in order to take advantage of current market conditions. I note the Minister has moved on that problem to some extent.

After the current five-week process and the decision by the council, people will have only four weeks to make an appeal application to An Bord Pleanála. The latter's target to make a decision is usually 18 weeks. From my experience of my constituency and neighbouring ones, even the largest proposals rarely receive an oral hearing. The only instances where there have been oral hearings have been for very large developments of perhaps more than 500 homes or for shopping centres and developments of that type.

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