Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

A good planning system is vital for any well-functioning society. It enables us to plan and to build in a co-ordinated and sustainable way to provide houses, schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure, to create and sustain jobs, to ensure our businesses and communities have access to renewable energy, and to protect our urban and rural environment.

Much of our planning system works well but decades of underfunding of our planning authorities by the Government, alongside years of bad Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael planning legislation have created problems that must be addressed. There are too many delays in our planning system, particularly in An Bord Pleanála. There are too many conflicting sets of planning laws and rules that create conflict in our planning system and lead to litigation. The transposition of EU environmental legislation too often has been partial and inadequate, leading to bad planning decisions and regular European Commission infringement proceedings, along with hefty fines.

There are too many delays in long-promised regulations, whether for wind energy or rural planning, leading to inconsistency across local authorities and confusion for applicants and communities. Much needed planning and environmental legislation for our marine area, including the marine protected areas Bill have been, and continue to be, delayed. This undermines the delivery of much-needed offshore wind energy and the protection and restoration of our marine biodiversity.

Too often communities rightly feel excluded or insufficiently equipped to positively shape planning outcomes. Instead they are forced into a zero-sum conflict on individual planning applications. Like so many other areas of government policy, the challenges and problems in our planning system today are a result of bad decisions by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Of course it does not have to be this way. Sinn Féin has long campaigned for a planning system that meets the social, economic and environmental needs of our society. We want a planning system that delivers good quality planning decisions in a timely manner. These decisions must be made following meaningful public participation. The planning system must work in a manner that allows the State to meet the social and economic needs of society. This must be done in a way that allows us to meet our Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2050 and halt and reverse an unprecedented level of biodiversity loss.

We urgently need new homes, schools, hospitals, public transport routes, and wind and solar energy. These can be delivered in a way that does not deepen the climate and biodiversity crisis. To achieve this we need to undo decades of underresourcing of our planning system and decades of planning legislation by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. For too long local authority planning departments, An Bord Pleanála and the courts have been chronically understaffed. While there has been some improvement in staffing sanctions for An Bord Pleanála only half of these have been recruited and more are needed. The situation for our local planning authority is less positive, with limited new sanctions only just approved and chronic understaffing in our planning and housing departments. Likewise, the Government has promised to increase the number of judges dealing with planning cases but this is yet to materialise.

The consequence of this persistent understaffing is significant delays in planning decisions, particularly at An Bord Pleanála. A total of 60% of the board's decisions are delayed, some for two years or more. Rushed planning is bad planning but nobody benefits from these lengthy delays. This was made all the worse by a series of bad planning legislation, often rushed through the Oireachtas by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The strategic housing development mandatory ministerial guidelines on building heights and apartment designs, two sets of substitute consent legislation and transitional arrangements for large-scale residential developments have all caused chaos in planning system. Too often, particularly under the current Minister, complex planning legislation has been introduced in the dying days of a Dáil term as Report Stage amendments to other Bills, leaving little or no time for meaningful scrutiny. Despite significant efforts on the part of Opposition parties submitting hundreds of amendments to planning legislation in good faith and in order to improve on Government proposals, the Minister, like his predecessor, rarely listens.

The consequence of all of this has been the creation of multiple layers of conflict between Europe, central government, local authority planning and environmental law, rules and practice. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the disaster of the combination of the strategic housing development and a series of controversial section 28 mandatory ministerial guidelines introduced by Fine Gael in 2018 with the full support of Fianna Fáil. This toxic combination created unprecedented levels of conflict between planning applicants, local authorities and communities. An Bord Pleanála repeatedly made bad planning decisions that were legally unsound and, in turn, were challenged in the courts. In the majority of cases the courts upheld the judicial reviews yet An Bord Pleanála continued on this disastrous course. As a consequence, the State is now paying out up to €10 million per year in legal costs for lost cases.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael planning policy has resulted in bad planning decisions, increased litigation and significant planning decision delay. While the Minister eventually replaced the strategic housing development process with a return to local authority-led decision-making on large-scale residential developments he added to the problem with ill-conceived transitional arrangements and left the legally questionable ministerial guidelines in place.

Underresourcing and bad legislation are the issues that lie at the heart of the challenges in our planning system. I want to tell the Minister that Sinn Féin is up for fixing this. When the Minister announced his intention early last year to review and consolidate the Planning and Development Act 2000 we welcomed it as an opportunity for much-needed reform. We welcomed and engaged positively and constructively with the officials and all affected sectors throughout 2022.

We were disappointed but not surprised, as the Minister's much-hyped deadlines for publication and passage of the legislation came and went. When, eventually, an incomplete draft Bill was published in February of this year, the members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage worked constructively to conduct an intense period of pre-legislative scrutiny. Ten meetings were held in five weeks, running across 30 hours of hearings.

See this speech in context