Seanad debates

Wednesday, 10 November 2021

Planning and Development (Amendment) (Large-scale Residential Development) Bill 2021: Second Stage

 

10:30 am

Photo of Fintan WarfieldFintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also thank his departmental officials for yesterday's briefing, which was very informative. I had to be in the Chamber's ante room so I could not put my video on but I appreciate the briefing, as did my colleagues and Senators across the House.

Sinn Féin supports the legislation. We have some significant concerns about it, which I will come to a little later. When it comes to planning the type of city I want to live in, I want to live in the best place possible. I want good planning, democratic involvement of communities, world-class cycling and walking infrastructure and public transport, affordable housing, well-designed places, a good public realm and arts spaces, cultural venues and nightclubs that are protected from whatever the market forces are, be those office space or hotels. What are the tourists who come here supposed to do if we have no cultural spaces? The Minister's officials have been working with the night-time economy task force and I look forward to continuing those conversations with him.

Sinn Féin opposed the SHD legislation from the start. We welcome the return of the two-stage process involving the council and the board. We also welcome the statutory timelines that Senator Malcolm Byrne mentioned. As many representatives who have been both councillors and Senators will know, the SHD process has been a disaster. This is despite the fact that when the SHD process was going through the Oireachtas in 2016 and 2017, it was left to Sinn Féin and others to oppose it, which we did tooth and nail. We said it would lead to bad planning, planning delays and judicial reviews. We argued very strongly that the two-stage process should be kept, but with clear statutory timelines for pre-planning applications and additional information and board appeals. Fine Gael certainly did not listen to us and, disappointingly, Fianna Fáil Members sat on their hands and abstained.As a result we have had five years of bad planning decisions. There have been 50 judicial reviews of SHD applications when there were barely any judicial reviews into residential applications before that. It has not resulted in an increased housing supply because the vast majority of SHDs have not even commenced. After five years I welcome the fact that Government is doing what the Opposition, including Sinn Féin, has argued for; namely, that we should go back to the two-stage process with clear statutory timelines for pre-planning, statutory timelines for additional information requests and statutory timelines for the board. Many of us from Dublin and elsewhere know how bad the SHDs have been but I want to put the past behind us.

We in Sinn Féin know planning legislation is complex so we want to get the details right and we are going to be constructive in the Committee Stage and the Report Stage and so on in this House. We have significant concerns and I hope the Minister will take them on board. The first one relates to section 4 of the Bill. We think it is a mistake to restrict the right of local authorities to request further information before making a decision. We are being asked to sign up to something without knowing what the Minister is actually going to do. He spoke about publishing regulations. I ask him to publish these regulations before the Bill passes through the Houses.

The second concern is about section 6 of the Bill. We do not know why section 6 is there. It has nothing to do with residential large-scale developments or SHDs. It changes the procedures for appealing a judicial review decision of the High Court. Why is it in the Bill? Who asked for it? I understand that it was not in the general scheme during the Oireachtas committee pre-legislative scrutiny process. Of the 50 SHD judicial reviews, only two went to the Court of Appeal. It does not seem to be about housing. It does not seem to have anything to do with large-scale residential developments. Can the Minister advise where this section came from and who drafted it?

My most important point is that the legislation which was originally brought in by Eoghan Murphy to extend the SHDs was due to expire in December. Now the Minister is delaying the abolition of SHDs and thereby providing developers with an ample opportunity to submit planning applications using this deeply flawed legislation until June 2022. Unfortunately this legislation is going to be with us through most of 2022 with the process open for planning applications until June 2022. As my colleague Deputy Ó Broin pointed out, some applications will continue until October with the possibility of legal action late into 2022. It is another long goodbye for bad policy. While I commend the ultimate banning of co-living, it took a very long time. We were dealing with co-living decisions still being made until the first quarter of this year. We are giving developers great leeway here in terms of the old process, making it sound as though we are ending something yet giving everyone an opportunity to get their applications in by 16 December. When judicial reviews are taken into account, it is clear that the SHD process will be with us for all of 2022. It took a full month to sign the regulation that gave legal effect to banning co-living and that provided developers with ample opportunity to get their applications in.

It is our intention on Committee Stage to amend sections 4, 6 and, crucially, 16. We do not accept that SHD applications should be allowed to continue into the middle of next year. That is an invitation to get applications in. While I fully support ending these SHDs and replacing them with large-scale residential developments, as we argued for in 2016, I absolutely oppose the transition arrangements.

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