Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time with Deputies Pearse Doherty and Martin Kenny.

I welcome the Ministers back from Sligo. As I watched the launch of the plan on the Sligo IT website last Friday, it struck me that it was probably the most expensive press conference in the history of the State. Not only was there a fancy website that people were busy uploading nicely produced documents to all morning, but there were radio, television and cinema advertisements, as previous speakers said. Is that the first time advertisements promoting something like this have been shown in a cinema? It had the feel of the launch of an election campaign rather than a strategic document but people can make up their own minds on that. The speeches were incredibly poetic, particularly those of the Ministers for Finance and Housing, Planning and Local Government. However, there was a lack of detail and I hope we will get clarity on some issues during the debate over the next number of days.

Sinn Féin supports the principle of a national planning framework and we support the idea of a high level strategic document. We tried to focus on high level strategic issues in our contributions and submissions. We also support the NPF being placed on a statutory footing and I will come back to that crucial issue later. I acknowledge the work of departmental officials not only in the preparation of the documentation, but particularly in their willingness to make themselves available to the housing committee and to committee members to assist us in properly understanding the complexities of the issues at hand. We have benefited from that.

Sinn Féin was critical of the final draft of the document and some of those criticisms are worth mentioning. The population targets were too concentrated on Dublin and its commuter belt and we were concerned at the weakness of the all-Ireland dimension. We were absolutely concerned at the silence on the north west, a crucial part of our island. We commented in submissions on the weakness on issues such as public transport and climate change mitigation and, most important, on an issue I raised from the outset, which is the spatial dimension of socio-economic disadvantage and the way in which generation after generation in particular parts of our country and our cities have continually been left behind because of bad decisions or lack of decisions by successive Governments and the need for that to be explicitly dealt with the framework if that is to be reversed.

I acknowledge that there are significant changes in the final document which relate to issues we raised in our submissions, but many of us continue to have genuine concerns about the content. I do not accept it represents a paradigmatic shift, as the Ministers suggested. More work is needed but I would like to focus on the policy objectives. If the NPF is ever put on a statutory footing, it will have legal force and strengthvis-à-viscounty development plans and regional development plans. Chapter 2, "A New Way Forward", deals with population. The Minister is correct that 75% of population growth will take place outside Dublin but 50% will be in the east and midlands regions and I am genuinely concerned that without proper action by central and local government, that 50% growth will be concentrated in Dublin city and the commuter belt and, therefore, even though 75% of growth is projected to take place outside Dublin, 50% will be in Dublin and its commuter belt with negative impacts.

I know that is not the intention of the plan but it is a real concern which needs to be addressed not just in the regional and local plans but in the direction of the central plan. It is not clear from reading the document how that will be avoided. I would like the Minister to respond to that question.

I welcome the inclusion of the north-western region, which was not there earlier, in this section. I also welcome the setting of targets for the north west and mention of interconnections between Letterkenny, Dundalk, Drogheda and Newry. While it is valuable that they are now included in the policy objectives, the outworkings of the investment decisions and the benefits for the people along those crucial corridors have to be further spelt out.

Employment targets need to be more than regional because within the regions certain areas are already lagging behind. While there is job growth in the south east it is not as fast as, for example, in the south west or other parts of the State. Therefore, if we are to ensure that the job growth at regional level adequately spills down to the sub-regional level, further attention needs to be paid to that.

Inner city communities in all the large urban areas, or working class suburban areas that have suffered historic State neglect, also need to be adequately focused on. It is not clear from the document how it is intended to address those. While this is a high level strategic document that does not detail its implementation, there needs to be a little more direction to the regional assemblies and local authorities to ensure that while they develop local detail they are mindful of regions or urban areas that suffer more acute levels of socio-economic disadvantage and are not experiencing the job growth of other areas.

I welcome Chapter 3, "Effective Regional Development", which is the big addition to the plan. It is not clear why the primary focus is on building up the larger cities, how that development will filter down in meaningful and structured ways to those broader regions. I am not asking for all the detail to be provided but for some direction to be given to the regional and local authorities so that they can do that. I also note in this section that there are no policy objectives. There are priorities in terms of development and so-called growth enablers but I presume they do not have the same legal standing as core policy objectives, as would be the case for a county or city development plan, an important distinction if this plan is ever put on a statutory footing. The north west remains the weakest served area in this section of the document. That needs more attention, particularly the area north of Sligo. The all-Ireland dimension is still too weak. While there are improvements more can be done.

I fully support the focus in Chapter 4, "Making Stronger Urban Places", on rebuilding and repopulating our urban cores. That is an eminently sensible policy objective and we all need to get behind it. I also support the focus on brownfield development and density although not at the expense of standards in respect of the quality or size of the accommodation. Residential development in urban centres must be accompanied by adequate transport and public services and that is why the national development plan, which Deputy Pearse Doherty will address, is so crucial. Affordability is also central. One of the reasons our inner city cores are depopulated is the high price of land. It is all very well to say we will develop those inner city cores but if there is not a real, concerted effort to ensure that the residential development there is genuinely affordable for average working families it will not succeed. The Minister knows I am very critical of his approach to affordability. Something on that front will have to change if that area is to be tackled seriously.

The regeneration and development agency has real potential if it is given significant powers not only to co-operate and collaborate with other public agencies and local authorities but to take hold of that land to ensure it is used in the most effective way. An example is the recent TV coverage of RTÉ looking to sell prime residential land for profit rather than the land being mobilised in the most effective way to meet affordable housing need in that area. Just across the road is the CIÉ bus station in Donnybrook, a place where there should be no bus garage. If there was a strong land management agency it could work with those relevant authorities and in some cases force them, if it had the powers, to swap those landholdings for lands held by local authorities on the edges of the city, near the M50, to ensure the best possible use of that land. If that is the Government's intention, and if it is in the legislation that it brings forward, it will have our support because that could be the most valuable element of the additional changes to this plan. The agency needs to be in the business of land swaps and acquisitions, including streamlined compulsory purchase orders of strategically significant pieces of land that could be used for residential or mixed residential and commercial development.

In respect of Chapter 5, "Planning for Diverse Rural Places", the idea in the public debate in recent weeks that this plan is rural versus urban was frustrating. Those of us who were critical of the over-concentration on Dublin at an earlier stage made the point that it was as bad for Dublin as for rural Ireland. We need to ensure the plan assures those social and economic spill-over effects into the less populated parts of the island just as it does for the regions.

We also need to have a grown up and honest debate about one-off rural housing. Some of the changes in the document are welcome but one-off housing cannot be allowed to proliferate at huge cost to the taxpayer because of the expense of delivering those homes. At the same time we cannot say to people living on rural farmland that they cannot develop if there is no affordable housing on the edges of towns or in the inner cities. The debate needs to be about how we square that circle of ensuring that people have affordable homes close to their places of work or where they come from in a way that does not impose too heavy a cost on the environment or on the taxpayer through the provision of public services. I am not sure we have had that debate yet, although it is not just a matter for Government, it is for all of us.

I do not have time to go into detail about chapters 6, 7 and 8 but unless there is adequate investment in the areas these chapters cover, the aspirations and policy objectives in the document will not be very meaningful. The target of 550,000 new homes is meaningless unless there is a clear mechanism for delivering them. For example, it is disappointing that there is nothing on vacant housing stock or better management of the vacant housing stock alongside the introduction of new units. Unless there is a realisation that direct investment by the State in the delivery of affordable homes to rent and buy on public lands becomes a major policy objective and spending commitment those areas will not see significant progress.

The new statutory guidelines in section 28 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 are potentially very interesting but we need to see more detail. That is not in the document. I like the idea of the housing need demand assessment by local authorities but I would like to see it done on a five-year cycle to govern long-term planning for local authorities rather than the present two to three year housing plans. I could say more about public transport and rural Ireland and the sustainable future sections but I will leave them to my colleagues. These are weak sections, given the kind of ambition in the rhetoric in Sligo on Friday versus their detail.

The Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2016 before the Seanad states that the draft of the planning framework would come to both Houses of the Oireachtas for approval and then be published. No draft has been approved by either House. The Minister is right to say a motion was passed by the Houses on 3 October to refer it to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government for comment. No vote on the approval of the draft has taken place. Therefore, I do not understand how the national planning framework can be on a statutory footing and nothing the Minister has said has clarified that. I have written to the Chairman of the committee asking that it seek independent legal advice, as is our right, to clarify that matter.

I hope I get the support of other colleagues on this. The Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, should want this to be clarified and, clearly, on a statutory footing. I do not accept the version of events he has given today. I do not accept the Government's assurance that what has happened to date will mean this is on a statutory footing when the Bill becomes law, which we expect it to do. Perhaps the best way to do it is to allow the housing committee to seek that legal advice to get the clarity we all need.

This is a better draft than the earlier version. If I had more time I would go into more details. It would have been much better, however, if the Minister had brought the draft that was published on Friday into a committee process in the House. This would have allowed a real detailed scrutiny rather than the Second Stage speeches we are left with here today. It would have given Members the option of making amendments to the document, as happens in county and city plans. If the Minister had done this, Members would have taken the responsibility seriously and we would have engaged with the Minister constructively. The plan would have been all the better for it. The Minister chose not to do that. As a consequence the plan is weaker. We will continue to work constructively with the Government on it because we want to ensure the plan is right. There will have to be a vote in the Oireachtas on a plan if it is to be on a statutory footing. When we get the legal advice to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government it will be confirmed and we will be back debating this issue at some point in the near future.

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