John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the contributions made by previous speakers on topics such as the treatment of homeless people and people in mortgage arrears or on housing assistance payment. I will focus on the strategic housing development, SHD, process and make a few constructive comments about it. I appeal to the Minister of State and his senior colleague to take these on. The Minister, Deputy Murphy, reviewed the strategic housing development process earlier in the summer. I believe I was one of the few Deputies who made a submission to that. He is due to lay it before the House. I ask him to pause and take some constructive comments on board before he does that for the simple reason, and he may not be aware of this, that he is in danger of creating, at the very least, a difficult situation and needless tension in some settled residential communities that accept there will be housing developments in particular areas but never envisaged the scale, densities and heights that were intended. The SHD process drives a coach and four through all of that.

I do not want people to think I am leaving aside the topic of homelessness or any of the other allied issues around housing, but I have a limited amount of time and I want to focus on the SHD process. One of the commonest themes that has emerged in the past six to eight months, and it has become very pronounced more recently, as I do house calls, which I do weekly, and meet parents who are in their late 50s or early 60s who ought to be enjoying their twilight years - I am sure they do not have a particular issue with this - is that more of their adult children are returning home. That is a fact. It is not a cliché or an anecdote.

The most acute case of that was in a part of Tallaght, in my constituency, where a mother told me her four adult children had come back to live at home, varying in age from 25 to 35, because they cannot afford rents. They are fortunate, and I am being ironic, in the sense that they are from Dublin, live in Dublin and work in Dublin and can at least can exercise that option to return to the family home in Dublin. A person from rural Ireland living in Dublin who is paying extraordinary rents does not have the opportunity to exercise that option to return home. In most cases, these adult children are returning home to try to save a deposit for a house.

One of the issues with the SHDs, and I will return to it, is that they are promoting build to rent predominantly in Knocklyon, Scholarstown, Tallaght and Citywest, in my constituency. They are not promoting build to own. The Minister of State is asking people who cannot afford existing rents and who have returned to their family home to avoid having to pay those extortionate rents to save money for deposits to take advantage of build to rent in their local community where extortionate rents will be charged. It simply does not make sense. They want homes. They want to be able to buy. We have to be able to subsidise that, if necessary, because when it is balanced out, as I have said on a number of occasions, with the amount of money the State is spending on housing assistance payment, it goes into a black hole. The State certainly does not get any benefit from it. I acknowledge that, without the private rental sector, there would be no homes for people who are on the housing list, but there is no benefit to the State. The State does not get any asset benefit from the HAP.

The second point I want to make is that chief executives of local authorities are becoming increasingly concerned about the speculative nature of many of these strategic housing development applications. There are scores of them before my local authority, South Dublin County Council.

Some senior officials in different bodies believe these are speculative, and if the developers secure planning permission, they will simply flip the properties to make a profit.

When it was set out at the start of 2016, the strategic housing development process was well intentioned. The whole idea was to try to fast-track planning to deliver houses on the ground. Since then, we know, as a result of academic studies and journalistic articles, especially those in The Sunday Business Post, that the delay in the planning process is a contrived delay brought forward by developers and supported by their public relations companies and the Construction Industry Federation. The idea has been to create the impression that what is stopping houses from being built is a delay in the planning process. Yet, planning permission for thousands of SHD units has been granted and thousands exist on paper only without a shovel stuck in the ground.

I wish to return to the issue around SHDs. Perhaps I ought to have articulated it having served on a local authority for 18 or 19 years. I would have taken An Bord Pleanála out of any fast-track process and ended the process with the decision of the local authority. I came from and served on a good local authority with an excellent housing department. I did not always agree with the planning decisions but it was a good housing department that was transparent, publicly visible, utterly democratic and allowed public representatives to represent the people who elected them. It allowed those representatives a strong voice when planning applications came forward in communities.

This is the greatest scandal for ordinary thinking people. In the case of Citywest and the Fortunestown area, a local area master plan was devised in 2012. It covered how the area would develop in terms of housing, amenities, facilities, the provision of sports and cultural facilities, transport and traffic etc. Yet, a ministerial order can simply override the local area plan and the country development plan. In the case of Citywest, even if the developer had a mind to take note of what was in the local area plan, the plan is hopelessly outdated now. What was being proposed in 2012 was not eight, nine or ten storey mass-density build to rent accommodation. That plan proposed settled residential mixed developments. There were some apartments as well as duplexes and homes where people could make their families. The area is beside a major transport hub with the Luas. However, not everyone who lives in Citywest wants to go to the city by Luas. People who live in Citywest know that the green line is 99% off road but the red line encounters all manner of traffic and obstacles on its way into the city. It can take one hour and 20 minutes to get from Citywest into the heart of the city centre.

This is only beginning to hit local communities because the SHD process is beginning to gain traction now. More and more are going into the system. In Knocklyon, on the lands owned by the former Taoiseach, the now deceased Liam Cosgrave, Ardstone Homes wants to build close to 600 units, which are almost all apartments. It is not beside a college, business or Luas station. It is miles from a Luas station. It is not beside a hospital or business park. It is a build to rent project. It is 100 or 200 yards from housing estates where adult children are returning home to live because they cannot afford rents. I put it to the Minister of State that there is no greater metaphor than that development. It represents a complete failure of Fine Gael housing policy. There is no greater metaphor than someone applying and being granted permission on lands owned by a former Taoiseach and President of the Free State. It was the ancestral home. What we will see eventually on the land is 600 units of apartments that do not promote family living or community. They are not particularly well serviced by public transport, notwithstanding what he developer might say.

In Tallaght, the board turned down several SHDs and said we needed a master plan for the area. In fairness to the local authority and the elected members, the county councillors are now considering that. It may help provide a context so that we do not ghettoise parts of the town again. If any built town suffered in the past 30 or 40 years from planning mistakes, it was Tallaght. This is an opportunity to ensure we can build a modern, thriving, dynamic centre and improve on what is in place rather than repeat the mistakes of the past and end up with four, five and six storey buildings where there are no families, a transitory population, no one bedding down, and dwellings surrounded by absolutely no amenities. That cannot build a good society.

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