Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Like my colleague the Labour Party housing spokesperson, Senator Moynihan, I want to give this Bill a cautious but qualified welcome. Any initiative designed to expedite the development of much-needed homes across the country, especially in urban areas where demand is high, is welcome. We would all agree on that. The theory was that the SHD legislation passed by the previous Oireachtas was going to do the devil and all. It sought to create an environment where homes could be developed at scale and in a more efficacious timeframe than was traditionally the case. In the then Minister’s wisdom, that meant an innovation that got those dastardly councils out of the way and allowed developers to go straight to An Bord Pleanála. Ultimately, the legislation passed by these Houses meant the only recourse available to citizens to challenge or appeal against a flawed application, an unlawful decision or a decision that may have gone against the city or county development plan, or that compromised process, was to undertake a costly judicial review. This was never right. The system, as we pointed out at the time, was always going to be beset by problems. It rooted out an established cornerstone, or at least the appearance of democratic oversight, in the sense that local authorities were in essence bypassed or pushed aside from the early stages of the process, or at least the process we previously knew and that was well established. Fairly perfunctory consultation took place at area level with elected members of the council, and their views were canvassed and submitted to An Bord Pleanála, which made determinations on applications. The arrangement had all the hallmarks of a system and legislation that were rushed and not thought through properly. It seemed to us to be a charter for developers to railroad through some wholly inappropriate developments. That turned out to be correct in many cases.

There have been some successful judicial reviews pertaining to SHD developments that were initially approved in my constituency, specifically in the south Drogheda part of east Meath. I recall criticisms of those who pursued their democratic right to seek a judicial review of a project or decision; in truth, they were absolutely entitled to take such cases under our Constitution, as I hope we would all agree. The courts, nine times out of ten, backed them up.

Bad law and a failure to be faithful to, or comply with, established environmental laws always have to be called out regardless of the circumstances. We must not just decide to set aside laws passed in this House or give anyone, even if he or she is building much-needed homes, a free pass because we need those homes. The law should always be upheld; end of story.

The SHD system was overrun with problems from the get-go. The SHD review in 2019 stated clearly that the rate of building was less than what might have been anticipated given that the process was designed to make it easier for those who have the capacity and resources to build at a large scale to do so. Its legacy has also meant the development of a lot of inappropriate projects, including a disproportionate number of build-to-rent developments. Most egregious of all was the way in which so many sites that were good to go were sat upon by developers to take advantage of the developer-friendly system. They sit back and watch the value of their zoned land, with full SHD permission, climb in value all the time.

What should have accompanied the SHD laws were strong use-it-or-lose-it provisions. The legislation should never have been used to exploit land and to simply watch its value grow as it was allowed to lie idle. That was a slap in the face for the hundreds of thousands who want and need a home to buy or rent privately on good terms, or those who are looking for a home to secure through their local authority. We have to learn the lessons from the flaws we witnessed in the SHD system and ensure they are applied to the new LRD system.

We also need to include other measures that the Government is only now belatedly considering in respect of interventions in the housing system. To be fair, many of the lessons of the operation of the SHD system have been learnt and applied in the context of this legislation and the regulations that will come our way when the legislation is enacted. We must make sure that if and when projects are built under LRD, developers are forced to move away from the practice of keeping homes empty to drive up rental costs and keep them artificially high. As the Minister will know, Senator Moynihan, Labour's housing spokesperson, has identified schemes where you can look into the windows and see the plastic covering still wrapped around furniture. Those schemes are not far from here. That is an utter disgrace and illustrates part of the problem we have with housing supply, land and property hoarding in this country. It is beyond urgent that the State counterbalances the kinds of pro-development laws we are considering here with the need to disincentivise land hoarding and other activities, which we know are happening day in and day out, to inflate the property market.

We need to see the zoned land tax introduced. It is provided for in the Finance Bill and it is way past time that it was introduced. We would have liked to have seen it become operational well before its stated commencement date. We have argued consistently for a vacant homes tax, as the Minister will know, but it still has not been legislated for. We are told the new local property tax registration process is collecting relevant data but, in truth, it should not have been beyond the ken of a sophisticated, modern EU State administration to collect those kinds of data in another way. The truth, however, is that the political will just was not there.

We should also focus on the scourge of dereliction when we talk about property and the requirement to develop homes. Nowhere is more affected by this hideous phenomenon than the historic core of my home town of Drogheda, which the Minister knows very well. The levels of dereliction and vacancy of fine old Georgian properties, poorly maintained unique Dutch Billy buildings and the fine old warehouses around the centre of the town, which hark back to our industrial past, are simply shocking. The national planning framework policy is to prioritise the development of urban brownfield sites for compact growth, and I support that. That is the sensible, smart and sustainable thing to do. There is, however, an onus on us to understand why these existing buildings are vacant and derelict and who owns them and to implement a strategy to bring them back into use, not just to regenerate our towns and cities but also to provide decent homes where people want to live. This point relates directly to the Bill. We spend an awful lot of time in this House, as do officials in the Minister's Department and the Minister himself, properly so, ruminating as to how we can get more homes built. It is the biggest social and economic challenge of our time. However, what is the strategy to revisit the structures and buildings we already have, specifically the buildings that are unoccupied and could be brought back to use? Prioritising that would be the sound and sensible thing to do.

A start would be, for example, to measure the scale of the problem by embarking on considerably more town centre health checks undertaken by the Heritage Council. I know that the Minister's Department resources the Heritage Council, but I find it very difficult to get information from the Department on the resources being made available. The Heritage Council is under serious pressure. It wants to undertake these collaborative town centre health checks to get a clear picture of problems of dereliction, vacancy and so on in our town centres but, in my view, it requires additional resources. I therefore ask the Minister to clarify today if he can - if he does not have the opportunity today, he might correspond with me - and let me know precisely what that relationship is and how he plans to resource the collaborative town centre health check process. I accept that there is a commitment in the programme for Government to do that, but commitments are one thing and funding and resourcing are another.

The kinds of interventions we are talking about in this new legislation which, as I said, we in the Labour Party cautiously welcome, need to be accompanied by a much more holistic approach to the provision of housing more generally. Planning law has to guarantee balance and the delivery of appropriate development. My colleague, Senator Moynihan, has noted that a significant number of SHDs under the current legislation are student accommodation and build-to-rent. The return of councils to the heart of the process may lead to better outcomes, better balance and more appropriate housing in meeting the reality of local needs, not simply what developers might want. That would also mean improved standards for multi-unit, high-density apartment block developments. That means more floor space, balconies and decent open space and, even in build-to-rent developments, provision for owner-occupiers.

I welcome the fact that local authorities will essentially now be back in business in respect of these large-scale developments. It was a real mistake to set aside the traditional local authority function in considering large-scale planning applications. We are all the worse for it. The SHD experiment, by and large, has not worked. It has not even met the initial expectations set out for it. One thing I very much welcome in this legislation is the provision for a better pre-application process to enable proposers of developments to get things right. That is crucial. The function of local authority members will, I think, be crucial as well. I also welcome the provision in the legislation to allow for appeals to An Bord Pleanála. That is only right and fair. At the end of any process, propositions and determinations can be examined by the courts to be tested or if they fall foul of the law. It is important, however, that there is a proper function for An Bord Pleanála, as we have always understood, to make determinations on appeals and, crucially, that there is a clear timeline. That is really important to provide the confidence proposers of developments need to understand that their developments and proposals will be taken seriously and that there is a very clear timeline towards which everybody works to ensure that proposals get over the line and, crucially, are properly examined by the appropriate authorities, by which I mean the local authority and, subsequently, An Bord Pleanála.

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