Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The last couple of times I was in here, I went off subject but the Ceann Comhairle will be delighted to hear that I will stay on subject this evening. Unusually, I find myself agreeing with Deputy Ó Snodaigh on one point. I would like to bring to the Minister of State's attention the issue of trees, which is not entirely related to planning. We saw during the recent storm that Ash dieback created a huge problem. Virtually every Ash tree in the country is rotten. In a lot of estates that were taken in charge by county councils the tree of choice was Ash and it is a huge problem. I have talked to tree surgeons who told me they have never dealt with as many trees in need of removal as they did after the last storm. Something needs to be done by the Department in conjunction with the Departments of agriculture and transport. It is going to be a huge issue on our roads as well. I suspect a time will come when insurance companies will void policies if they detect Ash trees along the roadside. Major work needs to be done on this in the new year.

I commend the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, and the senior Minister, Deputy O'Brien, but more importantly, the staff who have worked tirelessly over many long hours on this momentous legislation. It will rightly provide the cornerstone for Irish planning into the coming decades. We all agree the current planning process is cumbersome and is certainly open to distortion and manipulation and this review was long overdue. I was particularly proud to be a member of the Oireachtas housing committee that oversaw the delivery of the Bill to this point. It was a steep learning curve but it gave us a great insight into the challenges and opportunities this legislation presents.

There are several key wins in the new Bill that I would like to home in on. It will improve consistency and alignment through all planning. We will see a significant restructuring of An Bord Pleanála, to be renamed An Comisiún Pleanála, and an increase in its resources. The Bill provides for the introduction of statutory timelines for decision making which is probably one of the most frustrating and biggest bones of contention for developers and for communities who are upset or perplexed by would-be development. Another win is the reform of the planning judicial review process, including the introduction of a scale of fees and an environmental legal costs financial assistance mechanism. That is very important because there are groups that are genuinely motivated and that want the very best for their communities. They are not anti-development or part of the not-in-my-back-yard syndrome but have genuine concerns and the legislation is safe in the sense that they will not be excluded from the process. I am particularly excited by the new provisions for urban development zones underpinning key growth areas. This is going to be key for provincial towns in particular.

The Bill also provides mechanisms for the Government to make clear provisions for national planning policy measures and guidance in the form of the national planning framework and the national planning statements delivered through a plan-led system based on an integrated hierarchy of plan making. Key components of this will be a national planning framework and the three regional assemblies' spatial and economic strategies. The latter is very important for local county councillors who have felt frustrated that our regional assemblies were not getting the mandate or the authority they needed and deserved or the focal position they needed within local government. This legislation gives them an additional responsibility and that is to be welcomed.

We will see 31 local authority area development plans as mandated by the local planning authorities. Crucially, the hierarchy of plans will also underpin the delivery of our national climate objectives. For the first time our national planning policy and delivery will be aligned with our climate ambitions and targets. The Bill will ensure transparency and timely decision making, facilitate consistency and quality in decision making, ensure it is proportionate and sound and incorporate and encourage public participation in the plan-making and decision-making processes. Key to this is that we engage communities and bring people along. Too many times people get exercised because they feel they did not know something was happening or knew nothing about it until the planning notice went up. There is an onus on us and on local authorities in particular to get greater public engagement with our county development plans. Deputy Ó Snodaigh referred to the county development plan as the bible but unfortunately very few people, apart from local representatives, those with a key interest in their local communities and certain professionals, are aware of the county development plan or will ever have looked at it. Yet, it is a defining document in the context of the growth of a community and how it will evolve over a number of years.

The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage undertook comprehensive pre-legislative scrutiny over February and March of this year and in May we submitted a report with more than 150 recommendations. I am pleased that these were carefully considered by the Minister. While a number of our recommendations pertained to the wider planning system rather than the primary legislation, the majority either informed the technical refinements in the Bill or had their policy objectives met by the revised Bill. Again, I thank the Minister of State, the senior Minister and the key staff who worked so diligently on this.

The Bill puts a very specific onus and responsibility on local authorities to drive and manage development in their areas for the betterment of local communities. Crucially, local authority development plans will be extended to a ten-year cycle. This is very important for local authority staff given the amount of work that goes into the development of these plans. I know that in Longford, for example, two years of work went into our award-winning county development plan. Staff were sidelined to work on it when they should have been fully engaged in the planning process itself. The Bill provides for a ten-year plan with a review after five years, with a key focus on spatial planning and a framework for decision making. Local area plans will be replaced by specific types of area-based plans. These will include urban area plans for towns designated as regional growth centres or key towns and proximity area plans which will be for a sub-part of an urban area that merits a specific plan. This will be critical in the context of regeneration of specific areas in towns and cities that may have significant socioeconomic challenges and in that respect is very welcome.

I also want to welcome the fact that the roles of the Minister and the Office of the Planning Regulator have been clarified in the context of the issuing of directives. The office will recommend to the Minister that a draft direction is required and the Minister will consider that recommendation. He or she will then direct the office to issue or not issue the draft direction. That is very important because too many of our local authorities and county councils are frustrated and annoyed by diktats from the planning regulator.

The time period for planning authorities to make decisions will remain at eight weeks. It is important the Minister did not extend the time period beyond that. This applies only to applications that do not require an environmental impact assessment report, EIAR. The timeline for applications that require such a report will be 12 weeks. This is in recognition of the additional complexity that will be addressed in these cases. As highlighted by the committee's report and a significant number of stakeholders, it is critical that the planning system is adequately resourced to undertake these and other required functions. This is essential in order to ensure the system we have can operate effectively and efficiently to deliver on the ambitions of Government and meet the economic, environmental and social needs of society in the interest of the common good. The planning process is influential and is very much the gateway through which we see all major development proposals. Equally, it is the process through which all of these proposals must be examined and ultimately validated. Increased complexity and the risk of litigation over many years has placed significant demands on the planning system at all levels and means that greater levels of input are required than in previous years to deliver comparable results.

I referenced earlier the integrity of the planning process. Given the recent controversy involving An Bord Pleanála, there is always a risk that we tar everybody with the same brush but over decades we have had many people working in local authorities, particularly in the planning departments, who are motivated by one absolute and defining goal, which is to deliver the best possible for their local area. I would reference one man in particular, the recently retired planning officer from County Longford, Mr. Donal Mac An Bheatha. We brought him all the way down from Dublin and re-programmed him and we can probably say he qualifies as a Longford man now. He brought a new perspective. He came to our county impassioned and emboldened with a belief that it was good to live in rural Ireland, that we should be encouraging people to live in rural Ireland and should take every opportunity to facilitate them in doing so.

For too long, we have allowed a system and institutes, such as the discredited An Bord Pleanála, to make it a bad concept or a dirty word to say that you want to live in rural Ireland. We heard about everything from ribbon development to the pressure it will put on resources and services, and all those issues. Ultimately, however, we see, and we saw in media reports today, the cost of the delivery of housing.

That brings me on to the Office of the Planning Regulator report and the number of houses it projected for County Longford. The midlands region has a population of 118,000 people aged between 18 and 45, but that report reckoned there was no requirement for housing in County Longford. Yet, we have people in the county who say they would love to live there post Covid. We saw, with the move to work from home and hybrid working, that people want to live in these rural areas. It is cheaper for them to build a house, the services are there, and there is great education and great opportunity. Many of our key blue-chip multinational companies say their biggest challenge now is attracting staff to the midlands and to rural Ireland because of the unavailability of adequate and decent housing. I hope that is something that can be addressed.

I will make another key point for the Minister of State to take away. I have already spoken about the integrity and commitment of our staff in local government and planning departments. If you take to anybody throughout the country, unquestionably they will say there is absolute integrity in our planning teams across all our local authorities. They work very hard and under extreme pressure but they are committed. Many of them live in and have ties with the local community. They want to put their own stamp on and investment in the future of their local community and they work to their best. I have seen them and I see the pressure and strain they are under. As we move to staff up an coimisiún pleanála, we should not raid our local authorities and take the best and brightest staff out of them to put them into this new organisation. It was never more important that we adequately staff our local authorities, our housing departments and, more crucially, our planning departments. We are now giving local authorities a massive piece of work. We are giving them the legislation to make grandstand changes in the way we deliver progress in this country. It is now important that we do not tie their hands through not staffing those offices effectively.

I wish the Bill well on the rest of its journey. Again, I thank the Minister of State for his input, as well as the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, and, crucially, the staff who have worked so hard in the preparation of this.

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