Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senators should listen to what we are trying to do. We will introduce an amendment next Tuesday on Report Stage, which is very similar to the amendment the Senator will move later. We can tease out why there need to be tweaks and so on. We will require chief executives during the pre-planning consideration process, which is a statutory nine-week period, to inform and consult councillors on large scale planning applications going through this system. It will also impose an obligation on planning authorities to incorporate the view of councillors in their final report. If there are problems with that let us hear them and argue them out. The reason I do not have an amendment today is that I wanted to tease these issues out and we can finalise them on Tuesday. That is what moving from Committee Stage to Report Stage involves.

There are several things that I assured councillors of and I want to assure them again today. First, when they make decisions on zoning they will not be undermined by this legislation or process. They will have an involvement, if they choose to, in the pre-planning consultation process and they will be able to make observations and objections if they want to when the formal application is made to An Bord Pleanála as well. There is a role for councillors, if they want to get involved in having their say on applications that are moving through the system.

Most planning applications will not go through this system. Most will be for five, ten, 15, 40, 70 or 80 housing units in different parts of the country, many in and around the Dublin area. We have not seen large scale developments of the quantity we need in the areas where we need them on lands that are zoned. We need to try to encourage that quickly. There is no point having a special development zone, SDZ, in Adamstown that can accommodate 4,000 housing units if we are building only 150 houses a year, when we need a more ambitious approach. There is no point having an SDZ in Cherrywood that can accommodate 7,000 housing units, if we are not moving on it. There are multiple examples of that around the greater Dublin area.

We are now moving on those sites and those developers are saying that I am giving them the certainty and they will back it up and start delivering. Two or three weeks ago we launched 23 “pathfinder” sites which we will prioritise to work with local authorities and developers to deliver 60,000 housing units across the country, not just in Dublin. In the next four years there will be 30,000 housing units on those sites. Doing that involves a combination of infrastructure, financing, planning decisions, SDZ master plans, proper negotiation around mixed tenure. Some get significantly more than the 10% social housing that is required under Part V because it makes sense for everybody to do that. We will be moving on projects such as O’Devaney Gardens which will have 30% social housing and finding a way to finance that and so on. We know that planning decisions for large residential developments take too long. That is having a restrictive influence. It is not stopping it but it is restricting it.

There are many sites that already have full planning permission, between 27,000 and 28,000 around Dublin. Many, however, have problems. We are addressing those problems through financing, infrastructure, a vacant site levy and all sorts of other things. There are sites zoned for housing that do not have planning permission. There are developers who want to go ahead and develop on them. We need to try to put a system in place that will bring certainty and encourage them to be more ambitious than they otherwise might be. That is essentially what this element of the legislation is about.

In terms of the social housing provision element, which Senator Higgins raised, many of those pathfinder sites have a big social housing element but in respect of some of the broader planning applications if a developer can deliver bigger projects he can deliver more social housing too. We do not have the luxury of maintaining the status quoand just tweaking it.

We have sanctioned almost 500 extra staff for local authorities, the majority of whom are in place. They are engineers, quantity surveyors, planners and architects who can speed up planning decisions. We are beefing up An Bord Pleanála by seven or eight people. One cannot compare beefing up An Bord Pleanála to deal with an extra demand here with increasing the staff in 31 local authorities. They are two separate issues. It is not one or the other. An Bord Pleanála is anticipating that it might get 50 applications next year under this new provision. It wants to make sure it can manage and streamline that process efficiently. It is not a silver bullet but it is an important part of the overall mix. I ask people to work with us on it. We will introduce amendments and try to support amendments when we can. Sometimes even though I agree with the sentiment in the wording of an amendment I might not be able to accept it without getting legal advice first. That is why we will be back here on Tuesday, to finalise some of those issues.I hope I have answered most of the questions that people have raised.