Rory Hearne (Dublin North-West, Social Democrats)

This planning framework is important but, unfortunately, it is insufficient and inadequate in a number of areas, which I will talk about presently.

I wish to discuss the housing emergency because it is linked to this. It is linked to what is absent from the planning objectives. I refer to the absence of an objective to deliver affordable housing and any assessment of what scale of affordable housing is required or how it is going to be delivered and where. We heard a claim yesterday by the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, that the Social Democrats and the Opposition had not put forward ideas, alternatives or solutions around housing but we have put forward a number of evidence-based solutions and I want to put them on the record again. For example, I wrote to the Minister about the proposal we put forward for a homes for Ireland savings scheme that would offer a new source of finance for housing. Indeed, it would be private financing. It was very frustrating to hear the Taoiseach say that this would not build any homes but that what was needed was institutional investors and private equity funds to provide finance to build homes. That is actually a contradictory statement. He said the issue was that we did not have finance to build homes but the home for Ireland savings scheme is a solution that can access additional finance to build homes and potentially leverage the €160 billion that is in the banks. I ask that the Minister take this proposal on board and see how it can be implemented rapidly and start providing an additional financing stream for affordable housing that would actually help to deliver homes.

The reality is that we are in a catastrophic situation. The level of homelessness that we are seeing right now is unprecedented but, unfortunately, it is becoming normalised by this Government. It is not just the current Minister, who is relatively new, but also previous Ministers. We must restate that current levels of homelessness or, indeed, any level of homelessness or any child being left homeless is a national scandal. I cannot get over how we have allowed the situation to develop whereby it is not a case of stopping everything because we have thousands of children growing up in emergency accommodation. I just cannot get my head around it.

We have measures like the tenant in situ scheme, which was working well and the Department accepted was working but has now been restricted for some reason. It still exists but its ability to function for local authorities is being restricted. It has already been reported that Dublin City Council in my own area has issues with regard to the funding that is available to make it work. The same is true of Kildare County Council and Cork City Council. These councils are saying that, due to the changes, they cannot use the scheme to the same extent they did last year. Will the Minister reinstate in full the tenant in situ scheme?

On the planning framework itself, there are clearly issues with zoning, the servicing of land and infrastructure but these problems have been there for years. It is extremely frustrating that they have not been tackled. It is only now that this is being looked at and the Government is asking if there are new ways in which we can tackle these issues. Why have they not been tackled up to now? I am concerned that what we are going to see is more lip service and claims that these issues are going to be tackled rather than properly tackling them. There are some fundamental issues at play here.

The proposal we made to zone land for affordable housing is not in this plan. I do not understand why we are not zoning land for affordable housing as has been done in other countries. It is a way to ensure that, when we are zoning land, it will deliver affordable housing in perpetuity. There is a fundamental problem in the zoning of land currently. If local authorities zone land for residential development and there is no set allocation for affordable housing, what we will see, which is what we see currently, is land being speculated on. When the land is rezoned, the private owner of the land gains the uplift from that rezoning and can sit on it or sell it on to someone else who buys it and then sits on it. There is no mechanism through which that land can be developed. There are no proposals or measures put forward to ensure that zoned land is developed. There is a flaw in this framework because there is no use-it-or-lose-it mechanisms in terms of planning permission or zoning. While the tax measures on zoned land might go some way towards forcing development or ensuring zoned land is developed, what the framework is not doing, ultimately, is addressing the issue outlined by the Kenny report in the 1970s of the speculative, windfall gain from land that is rezoned. It is home buyers who have to pay this. Countries like the Netherlands have a much more active land strategy whereby the state purchases the land, gets the planning permission and puts in the infrastructure. Essentially, what we are going to do is zone all of this extra land for residential development with no mechanisms by which to ensure that the infrastructure goes in and homes are actually built on it.

We can put the infrastructure in there but it may not necessarily be built on. We have a fundamental problem in how we are doing that because, ultimately, we are still taking this market-led approach to housing delivery and it is still in this plan. The entire planning objectives contain no mechanisms by which affordable housing will be built on land. There are no mechanisms by which this will be implemented, apart from aspirational references to what the Land Development Agency might do with public land. However, there are no mechanisms by which that will happen for private land. That is a major flaw that must be addressed. We need mechanisms by which, for example, the Land Development Agency is given full compulsory purchase order powers to compulsorily purchase private land on a significant scale and start looking at ways in which it can prepare that land and ensure that affordable housing is built on it and getting builders to build on it. Local authorities could also play that role. We are limiting what the State can do with land by only focusing on public land. There is a real issue about the public land we are using.

There is a lack of clarity on this and on outcomes and strategies in the planning framework.

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