Seanad debates

Friday, 28 May 2021

Affordable Housing Bill 2021: Committee Stage

 

9:30 am

Photo of Alice-Mary HigginsAlice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. I agree with many of Senator Casey's points. A review of the national development plan has been completed, but the national planning framework has not been reviewed. Now all of the new local development plans are being constrained by a planning framework, which is out of sync with our national development plan. There is a disjoin there.

As a starting point, I underline that I do not believe our new local development plans should be overly constrained by the national planning framework because it needs to be reviewed. It needs to be reviewed in line with all of these goals that we have in terms of housing and climate action.

I strongly support what Senator Fitzpatrick is proposing in this amendment. It is really good to spell out the fact that there are ideas at local authority level. The Minister of State has heard it. Great ideas and visions for future plans have been proposed.

I accept that amendment No. 17, which I tabled, contains good ideas but the elements of it are part of planning. They are part of the other parts of the planning piece. The great thing about local authorities and local authority members is that all of the issues are considered. For example, they will consider how planning joins up with public transport. If we have a national childcare infrastructure, as has been proposed, they will consider how that fits into the mix. They will look at where public amenities and access to green spaces comes into it, as with the idea of the 15-minute city and the ten-minute town. The local authorities can hold all of that. Sometimes we talk about the register of infill and brownfield sites but what is really important is that attached to that is local authorities' vision for what those sites could be and how they could fulfil both social housing and affordable housing goals.

I like the role this amendment gives to housing authorities. I have seen few plans that have gone wrong in my time here. The idea of publishing a plan every three, five or ten years means that good initiatives can be scaled up and rolled out elsewhere and that problems can be addressed, rather than reviewing the plan a decade later and regretting that we did not get it right. It is a good and sensible amendment. I think the amendment should go straight into the Bill as it is. I do not know if there is any need for it to be nuanced. From my perspective, it is very sensible.

To be clear, my understanding of the amendment is that each of these iterations - the three, five and ten-year plans - will then be voted on by the local authority so that the local authority members will agree them. Therefore, it is not simply an executive function but also a members' function. That was my understanding of it, which I just wanted to check. It is very sensible.

This should be guiding a lot of what happens. There are stored-up ideas. There have been good ideas that have been in the pipeline for decades. It would be great to see those ideas in the plan that is to be published six months after this coming into operation of this legislation.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.