Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Pringle for putting down the amendment. I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on it. There is broad consensus across all parties in the House that the sooner you bring people into the planning process, the more likely you are to get a development that mostly everybody is happy with. I do not think you will ever get one everybody is happy with. We should not ever be trying to chase that. I think every developer knows that and every resident does as well. What you do is bring people together.

Our planning system is very participative, right the way back. We end up with these conflicts when the drawing goes up and people see it and see five or six storeys or whatever it may be. However, our planning system is participative way back before that. The local residents elect councillors and that is a democratic process. Those councillors craft development plans and pass them. Then applications come in based on that development plan on which people can submit their observations. Those observations can be positive or negative. We always think in terms of objections but it is a submission and an observation on a planning application. I believe developers would be willing to engage in non-statutory consultations with local residents as well because they do not want a long, drawn-out process. They do not want a development that is going to be highly contentious and may end up in judicial review, and we have seen many of them going down that route. It makes a lot of sense. The earlier you bring people into the process, the more likely it is you are going to get an outcome that is acceptable to many people.

Deputy McAuliffe referred to bringing in the PPN, perhaps at the stage of the pre-planning consultations. I am not sure how that would work but at that stage, it would be sensible to try to bring in a community representative group. That would have to be an entity that exists so the PPN might actually be the right one. If you were trying to bring in a residents’ association it might be especially onerous on it to do that, whereas the PPN has those established links with the local authority already. It has those contacts out in the community and it could send that information out into the community where it is relevant. I hope the Minister will be able to look at this in the positive manner everybody is speaking about it with.

We are all aware we need to build more housing. That is obvious and every single one of us knows that. We do not hear people speaking about enough and in positive terms is that we have a limited amount of space in our town centres and in our towns and cities and we need to build at higher densities. It is always going to be contentious when you try to fit a large number of houses into an area where people have got used, over a generation, to having the type of three-bedroom semi-detached residential layout with eight to the acre and 20 to the hectare. That is the way we planned for the past 40 or 50 years. We planned all around the car and had this continuous sprawl out into the suburbs that results in people having commutes of two hours or more hour. They might be doing an hour and a half in the morning and the same in the evening. That has become normalised and it is really unacceptable.

We cannot make any more land and we cannot move it around. We know that. It is an unusual item in that sense. However, we must make the most of the land we have. Higher density make absolute sense to me. With higher density it is not just a matter of getting as many units as possible onto a single piece of land. It must bring other aspects into the whole planning process. It must bring a sense of community gain into it as well. It must provide for pocket parks or places where people can have recreation. Obviously, with higher density we are not going to be able to have front and back gardens of the same size as we had in the housing estates of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Thus, we must have that community gain and provision we see in many European developments. That is the way we are going to have to go and I think we know that. It allows us to provide transport and all those things that match that scale and the economies of scale that go with that. Bringing the community into the whole development process at that pre-planning stage where they can make those points makes a lot of sense.

I hope the Minister will take away these comments. I think that across the board here, Members believe he should look at this, either by regulation or whatever stage it may be, and come up with a process. Moreover, it should be a process that is sensible because not every pre-planning application is going to end up as a planning application. There are some that may not. We have seen examples of that in other areas where a site notice will go up and the application may be withdrawn. Then another site notice goes up. I had an example in my own town where there were about six or seven such notices up at the same time. That does not comply with the planning Act. You are meant to take your site notices down. People got confused and in the end they stopped paying attention to it. We do not want to end up in a situation like that, where we keep feeding out all this information, like saying there is a pre-planning consultation going on and nothing ever happens with it. Thus it needs to be gauged and done carefully. I hope the Minister will consider that as he thinks about this and brings it in through regulation or at the next stage, and takes on board what the Deputies have said.

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