Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for the informative briefing yesterday afternoon. I sat on the former Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government for four years, for three of them with my colleague, the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, and with Deputy Cowen for the year before that. We have always raised concerns about the SHD process and had serious reservations about it. I welcome the legislation that is being brought forward to eliminate that process. At the core of it was the lack of democracy around the SHD process. By reinstating it to the local authorities, we are restoring part of that democratic process. The other bit of it is the detachment the board has with the public, community organisations and people who interacted with the development plan process and were active in that field or with the political process. The board operated in a narrow, confined area where it only met and dealt with developers. This changes that aspect. I welcome it going back to the local authority process.

In response to Senator Warfield, a date has to be put on this at some stage. The date of 16 December is only five weeks away. If I was a developer, would I want to apply to a process that has completely failed with regard to getting an application process through the system to deliver houses or would I wait for a process I have known about for a number of months and which is more streamlined in the long term? I would probably wait for this legislation to come in to bring my application through it rather than use a system that has failed.

I have some reservations about one area, which Senator Warfield mentioned too. It is the area of further information. I believe we should look at further information as a positive to delivering planning permission and not as a negative which slows the process down. I say that for a number of reasons. The strategic housing development process was a professional system. When developers met with the board, they normally sat with 12 or 14 professionals around them. It somewhat excluded the smaller firms of planners or architects who could deliver the smaller scale houses in Wicklow or Arklow as opposed to the bigger developments in the city. Not all information could be provided for them at once. Further information can allow that application to proceed and deliver housing at the end of the day. What I believe is more important is for the local authority to engage now through the consultation and the submission process the public has done. Maybe something that was completely missed through the pre-planning process can be raised through a submission. With further information, that issue raised by a member of the public could possibly be dealt with and the application can be got across the line rather than being refused.

The Minister said this can be done in limited circumstances. I ask him to look at this again and to use further information as a positive and not a negative. If I could ask him to change anything in that process, it would be the timeframe the developer or the applicant has to reply about further information. We cannot bring the local authority into it because it only has 28 days to make its decision, but the applicant has six months to reply to a further information request. Even if the Minister brought that down to a month or six weeks, it would help that process.

I have some issues regarding national policy and county development plan policy. While it is hoped the local authority will have a greater understanding of specific sites because they are in its area, if there is an appeal to the board, I sometimes feel national policy will overrule local development plans. I have some reservation about that.

We can sometimes be too prescriptive in the legislation. While I welcome the 30%, a site anywhere could maybe justify 40% or 35%. Why can it not be site-specific as opposed to legislation prescribing detailed outputs when, at the end of the day, all we are trying to do is build houses?

A number of my colleagues mentioned support for local authorities. While the board had a designated team to deal with the SHD process, that skill level does not exist in each of our local authorities and some assistance will be needed to guide them through that pre-planning process.