Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This Bill deals with matters that are very important in the context of our society, the people of this country, our environment and many of the challenges we face. The latter include the acute housing crisis, climate change, the need to develop the infrastructure necessary to sustain our society and key matters like environmental justice and access for ordinary people to justice when it comes to planning and development and matters that affect them. It is terribly important to address these issues. On the face of it, the rationale for trying to improve and streamline those processes is a reasonable objective to make things more efficient, streamlined and consolidated. This is the main rationale for the Bill that seems to have been put forward by the Government. We have, however, heard evidence from others here and experts in this area that we are not off to a good start with this Bill in that regard.

We have a Bill of 700 pages that was published a week ago. For those of us who are not members of the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage and who have commitments relating to other committees - in my case, three other committees, so it was not possible to have gone through the pre-legislative scrutiny process - to have to grapple with all of this one week after the Bill was published means going through 100 pages per day, if you have the time to do that, which, self-evidently, we do not. I doubt the Minister has read this Bill. We have already heard that the Cathaoirleach of the committee that deals with it has not read the Bill. I doubt whether many of the people who have spoken here today have read all of it.

I reiterate the concerns about the information available to us. This is not in any way a criticism of the officials who produced the explanatory memorandum or the Library and Research Service - far from it. They must be in a desperate state trying to grapple with producing information, analysis and summaries in respect of this enormous piece of legislation in order to make it understandable, but that sort of timeframe simply does not allow it. This was the Government's decision. It was a ministerial decision to have a very short timeframe available to officials, the Library and Research Service, the public and elected Members of the Oireachtas to allow them to grapple with and understand what this Bill does - all 710 pages of it, 22 Parts, 541 sections and six Schedules.

This is why it was not a trivial point I made earlier when I said the Minister should have taken us through every section. People should be aware of this. Generally speaking, when Ministers come in here and introduce Bills on Second Stage, they go through every section. I agree that this is a big task when you have a Bill of this scale but to imagine that we could get a reasonable summary of this Bill from the Minister in just 20 minutes is just preposterous. It is, frankly, an insult to the Members of this House and any member of the public who might take an interest in the Bill.

The failure of the explanatory memorandum to align with the Bill has already been highlighted, but let me highlight it again. Regarding section 17, the explanatory memorandum states: "this section provides for the evidential value of the development plan." If you are looking for a summary, that is apparently what section 17 is about. When you actually look at section 17, however, it also refers to the national planning framework, the national planning statements, the regional spatial and economic strategy, urban area plans, priority area plans and co-ordinated area plans, in addition to the development plans and the relevant standards and bodies for certifying such materials. This is a small section of the Bill. If, with regard to section 17, the explanatory memorandum does not align accurately with what is in the Bill, we have got a big problem because it means that we cannot trust the explanatory memorandum. If we cannot trust the explanatory memorandum with regard to one section, we cannot be certain about it in the context of every section. We are dealing with a major deficit of information.

The Library and Research Service has produced two documents - Note 1 and Note 2 . Fair play to the staff of the service, because I do not know how they did it. However, none of the notes does what most of these things do, which is take you through every section of the Bill. Indeed, how could they given the timeframe involved? I reiterate that this is not a criticism of the Library and Research Service. It is being asked to do the impossible, and, not surprisingly, it could not do it. What we get is background and some fairly general summaries of the different Parts of the Bill, but we do not get that detailed explanation that we need because what this Bill is doing is replacing a Bill that ran to 800 pages. Where are the lists of the differences between the two? One of the phrases that is repeated in the various documents we have states that one section re-enacts or largely re-enacts what was in the Act ,but with modifications - sometimes with many modification and sometimes with substantial modifications - but we do not have a comprehensive list of what the modifications are and the rationale behind them. This is the sort of information we need because in order to understand this Bill, you have to cross reference it with the previous Bill of 800 pages to actually understand what the hell has changed here. What are the differences?

In all these 541 sections of the Bill, what was the reason for this change, what is the change precisely, etc.? We are being asked to do something that is virtually impossible and the Government could not even give us an extra week. Of course, this makes one worried straightaway. Perhaps rightly or wrongly, it makes one suspicious.

In the overview document from the Library and Research Service, certainly my ears pricked up in the third paragraph. This is the overview of the Bill. It refers to a recent industry survey, which revealed that property professionals believe that a streamlined planning system would be the most effective way of improving housing supply. The survey was carried out at Mason Hayes & Curran's annual property conference. It is encouraging, indeed, that that is one of the first references we have. The conference was called "Planning & Building for Tomorrow". In May 2023, it was attended by 500 industry professionals and included a panel discussion on the Bill. The survey found, not surprisingly, that 91% of the conference attendees believe that streamlining planning would have the biggest impact on boosting housing supply. It also found, fairly ironically, that 57% of the same industry professionals who were in attendance think that the Bill will have no impact on reducing bottlenecks in the planning system. One could not make this stuff up. They all want planning streamlined and we know why that is. When do they ever stop jumping up and down saying that it is the planning process that is the problem for them and we hear it then echoed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Deputies that this is the problem. Then we get a Bill which may well be, let me put it this way, dancing to their tune but they have absolutely no confidence that it will make any difference even from their point of view.

This is where the question of the rationale for all of this is important. The rationale for the changes is something I have referred to. In fairness, the Library and Research Service referred to it in one of its notes. The IGEES report, produced by the Department of Public Expenditure, National Develop Plan Delivery and Reform and the Department of Finance, a couple of years ago states, first of all, that we do not have a sufficient evidence base to assess whether the planning process is in any significant way an obstacle to the delivery of housing and infrastructure but we need more evidence, all of which is lacking here for the rationale, the justification and the evidence base for what we are doing. However, what it pointed to, as I have pointed out on a number of occasions, was that looking over a certain period of time at the planning consent process for residential development, it found there was no problem, by and large, with planning permissions. Some 85% of planning applications get permission. It varies in different areas and they give reasons. In rural areas, the level of refusal is far lower. In urban areas, it is higher, but it says that is probably because it is more complex in an urban area because of the different factors that would have to be weighed up. By and large, there is not a problem getting planning permission.

The number of planning permissions is far in excess than the number of commencements and completion. It goes on to say that, very possibly, the explanation for why we are failing to deliver in the output of housing is because of speculation, land banking, etc. IGEES speculates that the property people are speculating and that the evidence would suggest that may well be the case. To be honest, the dogs in the street know that is true. We can all see examples of it in our own areas where they have the planning permission, they have the SDZ and the whole bleedin' lot but it takes years because they drip-feed the development in order to suit themselves, whether they are flipping property, sitting on it waiting for the market conditions to be suitable for them to maximise the profit or whatever it might be, or for Government to legislate even more in their favour or to get more subsidies from the Government to build infrastructure or whatever it is. The market dictating is the problem, and not planning permission.

This also brings me to one of the omissions in the Bill, namely, the use-it-or-lose-it provisions. If land-banking, hoarding and speculating is a problem, we should have the use-it-or-lose-it provisions Government has been promising for a quite considerable amount of time and many of us have been demanding for a longer time that they should not be allowed speculate on land, property and planning permissions, etc. Let us not forget, it was in November 2019 that the then Minister for housing, Mr. Eoghan Murphy, said we would have use-it-or-lose-it coming very soon; it did not come. In November 2020, we were told it would be in the coming months but, of course, we had a report, I think from Mr. Killian Woods, suggesting that the CIF had been lobbying intensely to prevent the use-it-or-lose-it provisions being put in the Bill. There are no surprises there. Let us remember that Mr. Woods also reported previously, as was mentioned earlier, on the ill-fated SHD that did a lot to discredit the entire planning process and that it was lobbying from the developers that led to that legislation. At the time, Mr. Woods quoted developers saying, "We gave [the Minister, Deputy Coveney] our recommendations and they took it lock, stock and barrel and stuck it into the new housing Bill." Is this more of the same? Through emission, or through what is in it, is dancing to the developers' tune the very thing that has got us into the mess?

I should have probably said earlier in my narrative that something I have endlessly repeated in regard to the old planning Act 2000 - and I am sure many things need to be changed and I am not against consolidation and streamlining - is whether there is evidence that that Act has been a significant obstacle to housing supply over its history. The answer is, "No." In the period running up to 2008, we had 70,000 to 90,000 houses being built a year. The Planning and Development Act 2000 did not inhibit that. There were other problems such as places being built on flood plains, places that should not have been built and all sorts of things such as environmental damage, but that Act did not inhibit supply. The equation that all these objectors are blocking supply is just not true. There is no flippin' evidence for it and yet we have people from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael jumping up and down saying that all the time. Of course, that is the narrative of the developers and the property people who make money out of it.

Then, of course, we have the measures on access to justice. I am trying to fully get my head around it. It looks as if its purpose is to limit the ability of ordinary people and groups in communities who may have genuine concerns about the environmental impact of certain types of developments, whether they are on the marine where property developers are now grabbing our marine in the same way as the property developers dictated on land and led us into an absolute mess. Of course, the housing crisis is to do with that. That is the real reason we have a housing crisis. It is not because of the planning system but because we had a cowboy housing sector, totally privatised and totally driven by developers. Then it crashed and we had ten years of a desert because the developers decided it was not profitable for them to build housing and the Government compounded that decision by stopping building public housing for a decade. Even worse, when it has all the land banks briefly in its hands with NAMA, what does it do?

Does it build public and affordable housing? Does it move away from the developer-led system? No, it flogs it all back to a new gang of speculators, or, in some cases the same old speculators but now working in conjunction with hedge funds and wealth asset management companies from all over the world who are seeking to profit, benefit and exploit the housing misery that has been visited on the people of this country.

Returning to the access to justice issues, some of the campaigns we have had in our local area with groups like, for example, Save Our Seafront, have done the local community a big service in stopping completely inappropriate development in key areas such as Dún Laoghaire Harbour and the seafront, which would have damaged our environment, local amenities, marine life and so on. It seems to me that such groups effectively will be prohibited from taking judicial reviews in certain cases. All of the chips are going to be stacked in favour of the developers who have the money. They have the money and are not worried about costs but ordinary community groups will have more hoops to jump through to make their views known. It will now be up to the Minister, with the centralisation of power this Bill seems to involve, whereby Ministers will be doing up plans without proper accountability to or involvement with this House. It will be the Minister for the environment who eventually effectively will decide what local community or resident groups can actually take judicial reviews, together with what the costs of such reviews will be. It seems to me to be clear that there will be a chilling effect or it will be made harder for local groups to have access to justice when it comes to important developments which impact upon them and on their local communities and environments. That is both unnecessary and completely unfair and probably is in conflict with the Aarhus Convention obligations.

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