Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

As we know, €127,000 is the combined salary that a couple must now earn to buy a three-bedroom, semi-detached house in Dublin, according to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland today. The Government is pricing far too many people out of a home and could do much more to address this, such as by passing our Labour Party Bill to implement the Kenny report, or by launching a proactive construction recruitment programme to bring in more construction workers. Yet, we know that some of the price increases that people face when trying to buy a home are driven by delays and flaws in the planning system.

I want to focus on planning. Planning law in Ireland should be fit for purpose but our planning system is broken, mired in controversy, highly centralised and desperately slow. It is unfit to meet the needs of our growing population. The Minister acknowledged this when he promised us radical reforms but the Planning and Development Bill falls well short of the mark. He dropped the "use it or lose it" clause. There are concerns about the constitutionality of some aspects of the Bill. It will not address some key failures in our planning system. I want to hear more from the Minister about real reforms, such as on the Labour Party’s proposal to crack down on bribery in our planning system of the sort that was exposed by “RTÉ Investigates” on Monday night.

The Taoiseach told me on Tuesday that he was not convinced that a new stand-alone offence was required on this and we in the Labour Party disagree. It is vital that we crack down on planning corruption. Those who exploit the planning system for personal gain are not only making a quick buck off developers, they are also profiting at the expense of all those who want to move into a home of their own but who are locked out due to costs and delays. The actions of those who abuse the planning system increase the ultimate price for everyone. They increase the ultimate price of homes for us all. It is incumbent on the State to crack down on such practices but it seems that is not happening.

Last night, I was alerted to a concerning, recent and ongoing case. I was shown evidence of a party seeking to use the planning process to coerce a developer to pay more than €500,000 into an escrow account, in exchange for the withdrawal of an appeal to An Bord Pleanála. The party also insisted on the use of a confidentiality clause to cover it up. This feels like a return to the bad old days. In the correspondence I received, I saw evidence that this issue was brought to the attention of An Bord Pleanála months ago, but that no further action arose from it at the time.

As legislators, we have to act to address abuses within the planning system. We have to ensure that our planning system is not open to this sort of abuse because where it impacts in particular on residential developments, it is people who lose out and it is very serious. Is the Minister aware of cases of abuse like this within the planning system? What action does he propose to take to address them? Does the Minister now see the need to adopt our Labour Party amendment to the Planning and Development Bill to make this sort of behaviour a stand-alone offence? How else does the Minister propose to put an end to this sort of grubby deal and ensure our planning system is fit for purpose to deliver the homes and public infrastructure we badly need?

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