Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak on this Bill and highlight some of the problems it will cause. The Planning and Development and Foreshore (Amendment) Bill 2022 will entirely change the appointments process of An Bord Pleanála board members for the worse. It will seriously compromise the independence of the State's top planning body. The Bill hands unchecked powers to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, with complete discretion in determining the board appointment process. It also provides no safeguards or provisions for Oireachtas oversight, and it specifically removes existing safeguards on ministerial powers. Where there are no provisions for Oireachtas oversight, unchecked powers and the removal of safeguards, what we effectively have is the removal of accountability. Many will argue we do not have much accountability across Government and Departments, and this Bill will help to endorse that problem.

Appointments to An Bord Pleanála are made via a series of panels, representing a range of civil society groups that can nominate candidates. This system is by no means perfect but it provides for significant input from civil society. This is something that is key for the independence of the board to ensure there is a limit to the extent of ministerial control over it. This existing system can and should be reformed to ensure transparency, accountability and public confidence and to uphold An Bord Pleanála's independence. The Bill removes all safeguards, Oireachtas oversight and checks and balances on these powers, essentially giving the Minister the power to stack the board with his appointees, including ones who have not gone through a rigorous and open recruitment process. Such a process is vital to ensure the balance and mix of appropriate skills and knowledge is maintained on the board. For the board to function at the expert professional level we need it to, and given its vital role in making decisions in the public interest, it is key that An Bord Pleanála is fully independent from Government.

The Government claims this Bill is urgently needed to fill vacancies on the board and to address the growing backlog of cases. However, the Minister already has powers under the existing system to fill those vacancies. The Minister has failed to do that. The Government is exploiting this failure to change the An Bord Pleanála appointments process to concentrate power into the hands of the Minister and entirely remove existing provisions for Oireachtas oversight. I do not necessarily disagree with the need for An Bord Pleanála to have more board members to help deal with its workload and speed up cases but I look forward to hearing the Minister's explanation for why this increase is necessary.

During a housing crisis it is important that planning decisions are made in as timely a manner as possible to give confidence to the sector. As I said, that can be achieved without this legislation and by using the existing appointments process. I am strongly opposed to giving the Minister unchecked powers in the appointments system. The changes will not solve the crisis of the flawed decision-making in An Bord Pleanála and would likely make things even worse and further compromise public confidence in the board. It is an entirely irresponsible and inappropriate political response. The problems stem from under-resourcing, workload overload, unrealistic time constraints and excessive power given to the board through strategic housing developments, SHDs, and specific planning policy requirements, SPPRs.

The proposed amendment to section 106 will simply make the situation worse by removing any possibility of independence and concentrating excessive power in the Minister. The proposed amendments to sections 108 and 110 of the principal Act are tantamount to locking the stable doors after the horse has bolted. The quorum of two was only revealed during interrogation at the Committee of Public Accounts and should have been addressed. This should never have been the situation and we should not need legislation. We should have proper governance in these structures and common sense should apply.

I could be here forever and I have been back and forth with the Minister on this for two years. If the Minister thinks anybody thinks this legislation will improve housing delivery, that is a misguided notion. It will do nothing for housing delivery because the Minister has not tackled the problems that relate to housing delivery. This is a mask. The media is questioning why we are ramming this Bill through. Why are we doing so? We are doing it because it detracts from the notion that we would tackle specific planning policy requirements or that we would tackle the zealots the Minister has in planning in the Custom House, who continually make provision to increase the cost of housing delivery. They are zealots. The Minister just does not have the guts to come out and tackle them. Instead, he comes up with something that will have no bearing whatsoever on increasing the delivery or that will see to it that we will have housing where there is planning. There are many grants of planning on which we see no commencements. Why is that? It is because viability is the issue. That is an issue the Minister will not tackle because he does not how and we are two and a half years in.

If the Minister had done something, if he had taken one big step and shown us he knows what he is doing, I would have voted for him in the motion of confidence last night. It is because of this type of rubbish that I cannot do so. I cannot do so because the Minister continues to allow high-density developments. Because of where we are today, we have no housing delivery because we cannot deliver housing viably. There is no amount of nationalisation that will change it. High-density developments worked once upon a time in Dublin, but with the advent of interest rate increases, we can no longer even get funding for high-rise developments in Dublin. The Minister is well aware of that. What we have in housing this year will probably halve by next year. The Minister can shake his head, but he should show what he has actioned that will allow for houses to be built viably. So far we have a vacant site tax that will add 3% per annum to the cost of any site, a concrete levy that is coming forward that will drive up the cost of concrete in construction further, and there are many more increases. The Government has doubled the price of large-scale planning applications, for example. Will the Minister show me the action he has taken that reduces the cost of building and that allows us to build houses people want? These are houses with front and back gardens and side entrance access. People do not want duplexes or apartments and they certainly do not want terraced housing, but that is all the Government’s high-density housing allows for.

We have no three-bedroom semi-detached houses. The typologies I have seen at the Government’s density levels allow for about one semi-detached house per acre. Will the Minister get all his councillors around the country to have a look at what they are being forced to pass in county development plans because they do not know? However, the zealots in the Custom House are insisting these are the densities we will build at and outside of Dublin nobody wants those developments. No matter what the Government does, nothing in this Bill will increase or change that. Next year and the following year the delivery will be even worse.

I will give the Minister a statistic. There were 262,000 applicants for personal public service, PPS, numbers last year.

They all need housing alongside all of those who are here already. We are preventing people in their twenties, thirties and forties from ever owning a home with the prospect of trying to obtain a mortgage of 25 or 30 years. There is a good chance that we will have three generations during the Minister's tenure who might be in danger of never owning their own home. When he can show me the actions that will improve the delivery of housing then we will have a confidence motion where I can vote "Yes".

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