Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In any event, we are committed to not dragging this out unnecessarily, although I believe the earlier debate was necessary because of the late arrival of an amendment on the critical issue of rent.

I will make some brief points on this grouping. First, it is very unfortunate that the issues to do with what the Minister described as streamlining the planning process to achieve what he and all of us want to achieve, namely, the ramping up of supply of housing, are being linked to other measures. We are having to vote on all of these measures together, which makes it difficult when there might be some aspects of the Bill that would be better than nothing in that there would be some sort of intervention to improve the situation in terms of rents and housing, and others which we fundamentally oppose, and we fundamentally oppose these measures. Even if we agreed with some of the other measures or at least thought they were better than nothing, we would still be forced to vote against the Bill because of the issues in this amendment and one or two of the other groupings. That is unfortunate. I have said it before but it is important to restate it.

Second, all the points have largely been made about why what the Minister calls streamlining is in fact a dangerous dilution of the imperative for proper planning and sustainable development.

Such proper planning and sustainable development is critical because there has been such a terrible record of bad planning, no planning at all in real terms and unsustainable development. This is largely as a result of the fact the policies of successive Governments have infected the attitude of planning authorities over many years to allow and facilitate development that was not well planned or sustainable and was driven by all the wrong motives, largely the motives of profit. In addressing this problem the Minister is diluting the protections we need to have against bad planning and unsustainable development. We will rue the day.

The Minister might say all of this is justified by the need to ramp up supply urgently to deal with the housing emergency we now face. I wish to make a point that I do not believe has been made in this regard, and I would be interested in hearing the Minister's response to it because to me it is the most definitive piece of evidence that what the Minister is doing is unnecessary in its own terms. If the existing planning process was the problem in terms of delivering large-scale supply, how does the Minister explain the fact that between 2005 and 2008 we delivered 70,000 to 90,000 residential units a year under the old planning system? We had unprecedented record levels of delivery of residential property under the old planning regime, which the Minister states needs to be streamlined. It was not an obstacle to unprecedented levels of supply, therefore it is not the obstacle. At best it seems to be a knee-jerk and frankly ideological take on what is the problem, which is that it is somehow bureaucracy, NIMBYism and politicking at local authority level, when self-evidently recent history tells us this was not the problem. It did not block development. Perhaps at times it should have. There is the irony. Some of the development that happened in that period should have been stopped. Was it stopped because of the process or was it stopped because of the attitude, policy and ideology of Governments of the day and the degree to which that infected and, in many ways, held hostage planning authorities? I think most obviously of issues such as the relationship that developed over development levies and planning applications which, frankly, on sustainable development grounds should not have been but were allowed because local authorities effectively were bribed by the offer of development levies on developments. Throwing out the baby with the bath water, in terms of proper local planning and the public being allowed to have a say on major housing developments to ensure proper planning and sustainable development, is wrong.

Following on from this, I do not see how An Bord Pleanála will resolve the problem. We just had a strategic planning decision in Dún Laoghaire relating to the harbour, but the principle is the same. It went straight to An Bord Pleanála and did not go through the local authority. The result was delayed for approximately nine months from when it was originally supposed to be decided by An Bord Pleanála. I do not know exactly why the delay occurred but it probably occurred because An Bord Pleanála does not have the resources.

I do not see how overriding proper planning and sustainable development via local authorities, local planners and all of the provisions for public consultation and sending something directly to An Bord Pleanála solves the problem. I do not believe it will solve the problem and I do not believe it is the problem. We must vote against this because it will damage the imperative for proper planning and sustainable development in a way that will not actually have an impact on the critical issue of supply. We have elaborated what we believe the problem is in this regard, which is the Minister's over-reliance on our friends the private developers.

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