Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this legislation. While Sinn Féin supports the Bill, we also think it fails to address many of the larger problems and issues that plague our planning process and slow down housing developments. Local authority county development plans must be the primary documents, as councils are democratically elected and accountable to the local community. It is infuriating to see their authority being diminished and their powers bypassed over time as key decisions continue to be transferred to An Bord Pleanála. From my work with the Committee of Public Accounts, we have evidence that An Bord Pleanála is inundated with planning applications, particularly around strategic housing development zones. Judicial reviews are causing substantial delays and costing a fortune. We must ask why applications containing proposals for more than 100 units are being diverted to An Bord Pleanála when an application can take more than a year to get approval. That slows down the process when local authorities can sign off on applications, in theory, in eight weeks. It is not unusual for that to be done in 12, 13 or 14 weeks. Local authorities can sign off on developments within two months.

The evidence shows that there are major backlogs in the planning process at a time when we desperately need to free up more land for housing. The simple reality is that we need more land and more houses available as private, social and affordable housing for people to purchase and rent. The current rate of progress is too slow. Sinn Féin wants to see it accelerated.

Local authorities need to implement the vacant site levy more vigorously. Serious pressure needs to be put on developers and others to free up land they are holding for housing. Last year, councils in Ireland were owed €21.5 million in vacant site levies and collected just €21,000. I received a reply to a parliamentary question from the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage in February that confirmed Laois and Offaly county councils had not collected anything. Many other councils throughout the country, the vast majority of them, had not collected anything. The levy is clearly not working and does not serve as a deterrent to free up land that is badly needed for housing. Developers are holding land, waiting for prices to increase, while families wait for homes. That is the stark reality. We also need to ask whether the 7% maximum annual levy is high enough to act as a deterrent.

Sinn Féin wants to see power returned to local authority members and not the executive to drive planning development in their own areas. Councillors will do that if they are allowed to. We need to speed up the planning process through decentralisation and good, sustainable planning. We must impose serious levies on developers who are holding onto vacant sites, sitting on them and waiting for their value to increase.

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