Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish to speak to the grouping as a whole, and specifically to the so-called social housing amendment that was passed by the Dáil last night. Last week, we were told that this Bill needed to be fast-tracked through because we were in a housing emergency. The reality is that the social housing amendment has not been effectively looked at by the Department. In the briefing we received on Monday morning, I asked the Department whether it had a list of projects where the suspension of Part 8 might apply, or Part 11 as it is now. I asked the Department whether it had any units and what the on-site delivery times involved in that might be. Frankly, the Department did not know. It had done none of the homework on it and had not drafted the regulations to do with it.

We have been here before at local authority level, specifically on Dublin City Council for the suspension of Part 8. It is worth bearing in mind that even if you suspend the 20 weeks in Part 8, you are not saving the full 20 weeks because there is an awful lot of the process that must be gone through. You cannot magic up houses out of nowhere, as the Government side often says. So you are not even making the 20-week savings but they do not know where this applies. There were projects that did not have a Part 8 process that went through. I refer to developments like Springvale in Chapelizod, which is two minutes down the road from me, and Bonham Street, which is just off Cork Street, for the provision of modular housing just down the road from where I grew up. None of them will be ready before 2024. We signed off on that in 2018 so I do not see the logic of doing this as part of this Bill except to provide window-dressing for the Bill, which is effectively a ministerial or - as I see it - departmental power grab of An Bord Pleanála.

There are small changes that could have been made to An Bord Pleanála. Emergency legislation could have been introduced for the appointment of a chairman. There is no reason to do it during the last sitting week before Christmas. We have much fanfare about a Bill that was agreed by the Government but again lacks detail and has yet to be published in advance of January. For the life of me, I cannot see the logic and do not understand why this is being rushed through this House this week.

The last time we did this in 2016, we did it for the SHD process. Again, we were told this would speed up the delivery of social housing and we were in the middle of a housing crisis. What resulted was a load of housing delivery items getting bogged down in the planning process.

What we have in this country is a permissions system. We do not have a planning system.We do not have adequate master planning or pre-planning. We have SDZs, but they do not apply everywhere. There are individual disputes over individual projects and we do not join up our thinking. The blame does not lie with any particular side - Government, Opposition or otherwise - because the organisation has been established for almost 50 years. The evidence shows that we are not meeting our housing, climate and transport targets. We have an opportunity to look at international best practice in planning and to adopt an entirely new system, rather than adopting these last-minute rushed pieces of legislation to change the make-up of a board and do some tinkering around the edges with legislation that has been floated, but has not even been published for us to see the detail.

I want to put on the record of the House that no specific homework has been done on the social housing provision. We are told it is specifically for social housing and aims to speed up delivery. I would fully support it if that is what it was going to do. However, that is not the case. We have the evidence in projects that were agreed in 2018, with Part 8 suspension, and now there are people who are not going to be in their homes until 2024. That was the exact reasoning and rationale behind the suspension of Part 8 then. I cannot see how this is any different in any way. It appears to be spin and window-dressing.