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

I apologise if I am looking at Members and asking them to be concise and brief, but we had a long debate on this issue on Second Stage, Committee Stage and in the Seanad. What we are proposing to do, and it is a major part of the legislation, is to bring more certainty, a term that has been used a great deal today and last night, to the planning system. This is not bypassing local authorities. It is providing for a statutory period for a formal, preplanning process, which has never been in place previously, and for a 16 week statutory process for An Bord Pleanála to make a formal decision. The local authorities are involved in the nine week statutory process, under which there will be an onus on the developer to have a far more professional application. This only applies to large applications of more than 100 housing units or 200 student units, and it is only on zoned land. Currently, when an application goes to An Bord Pleanála, it is possible for the board to grant a planning permission on unzoned land, so this provision is more restrictive.

What is involved is a council and councillors deciding on zoning and on a local area plan in terms of how an area should look in the future when developed. When a developer or builder comes forward with a planning application, it must be consistent with that. They will go through an initial two weeks or so of informal consultation to ensure they are ready for the nine week statutory preplanning consultation. Councillors will be involved in that because they will have to be briefed by the planning department and management. There is no bypassing of councillors in terms of knowledge and briefing. At the end of the nine week period, the local planning authority will do a report recommending whether the application should be granted or rejected. It also has the power to recommend conditions attached to the planning. In addition, An Bord Pleanála will be involved with the local authority during that nine week statutory period. Therefore, there is local input. A person from An Bord Pleanála will be involved in that to ensure they understand the intricacies of the local area, the local area plans and other issues that should be taken into account. It is only at that point that the formal application goes to An Bord Pleanála for a 16 week consideration. We are anxious to have certainty at the end of the 16 weeks, because currently it sometimes takes longer than that.

This is a temporary intervention to try to get largescale developments moving. They are starting to move again now, but in County Galway, for example, one of the biggest counties in the country, there has been one planning application for a housing estate in the past seven years. There has been none in Tipperary. County Cork, the largest county in the country, has only had a small number. What we are doing is trying to make it easier to put the finance together, which is complicated sometimes for these big developments. It is far easier to do that when one has certainty on when a decision will be received. There is no certainty about getting an approval. This is certainty about timelines. The system puts the developer under far more pressure to have a more professional application from the outset. The system of planning teams in local authorities having to knock planning applications into shape because they were put together poorly in the first place, and spending months doing that and going back and forth for information and so forth, is not the type of system that can deliver largescale housing of the right quality in the right place, and quickly. That is what we desperately need, as is clear from the conversations we had earlier.

People, correctly, point to me and tell me it is my responsibility to get houses built throughout the country, to have housing estates built where they are needed, to ensure starter homes are built, to ensure the strategic development zones, SDZs, around Dublin see their full potential become reality and to have the 8,000 student accommodation units that are currently in the planning system built for students. That is what we are trying to do to respond to what many people have described as an emergency, although I have described it many times as a crisis. I am not seeking to bypass anything here. I certainly will not stand over a situation in which we get poor decisions. The current system for largescale planning has made desperate mistakes in the past. Sometimes it was poor zoning decisions and sometimes it was poor planning decisions. I would not stand over that. However, the idea that we should just tinker around with the current system and that it will be fine, much safer and so forth is not necessarily true.

We are making a pretty fundamental change here but it is one that has been thought out. It is one that An Bord Pleanála has bought into and that the local authorities with which we have discussed and teased this out understand it will work and bring much more certainty to ensuring that we can get large housing estates moving in the right places on zoned land, of which there is a good deal across the country. I trust An Bord Pleanála to make the right decisions here with the local knowledge it will get from the nine-week pre-planning statutory consultation in which it will be involved with the local authorities and from the councillors' knowledge of the detail of what is being proposed. I accept that some people do not believe this is the right way to do it but I do not accept this is undermining the system or bypassing local authorities. It is not doing that. It is putting pressure on the system to deliver in a reasonable timescale and we will give them the resources to ensure that they do that. There is the idea that instead of providing more staff to An Bord Pleanála we should provide staff to all the local authorities, but An Bord Pleanála is asking for an extra ten people. That number would not be sufficient for even one local authority.

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