Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Senator Burke has made some really important points. It relates to the hierarchy of plans in the planning system. We have the national planning framework, the national planning statement and the regional economic strategies which then feed down to development plans. They are all meant to interact with one other. I agree they should be extended to ten years. I have been through two development plan processes, along with Senator Fitzpatrick. I think we made some of our worst mistakes in coming up to a deadline of, say, 12 o’clock, that we were set by statutory processes and by which time we had to make decisions on really important things. We had been in for five days on the trot and were absolutely exhausted What Senator Burke said about the power to vary is really important - it is essential – and the power for local authority members to bring forward variations. In my time on a local authority, we were often superseded by things like ministerial guidelines, particularly when it came to things such as height in Dublin city. That comes back to the debate we had earlier on the national planning framework, the ministerial guidelines and the power of the OPR in the interpretation of those things. There are other elements of this planning Bill in the plan-led approach that need to be tightened up in respect of public consultation at that early stage of plan-led approaches in order that we do not have things like development plans being superseded. While I think ten years of a development plan is reasonable, the power to vary is absolutely key. When it comes to Dublin city, which is the one I have experience of, we varied the development plan quite often and we varied local area plans quite often too, but we had to convince the manager to be able to do it. That is one of the key points.

I wish to speak on another amendment I have in this grouping, namely, amendment No. 154. It relates to affordable housing zoning. There are many ways to try to achieve affordability in the context of land. How to get good supply of affordable development land in the places we need it has defeated so many people. It can be done through the taxation system. You can try to do it through the development plan system or things like having zoned land taxes. This amendment would allow local authorities to have affordable housing zoning. I am not saying it is a panacea or that it would automatically guarantee affordability but it would allow local authorities and their members to decide certain designations where only affordable housing can be built. It can be an essential part of the toolkit, particularly in urban areas, to try to engineer affordability into what is built in the area. I will give an example. In Dublin 8 a couple of years ago, there was a lot of derelict land in the Newmarket area. It would have been really good for residential housing zoning, and it was zoned residential. However, what we got was student accommodation almost exclusively. We got student accommodation development after student accommodation development. When An Bord Pleanála was before the housing committee a couple of years ago, it agreed that certain areas of Dublin have an over-concentration of student housing. Dublin 7 was one such area, Dublin 8 was another, and I think Dublin 1 was the other. However, because the sites were zoned for residential, An Bord Pleanála could not turn down permissions even though it knew there was an over-concentration of student accommodation there and no other standards of accommodation were being provided. This amendment seeks to at least allow the mix of affordable housing zoning to be in a development plan. That is what the local authority tried to do in Dublin city but it was told that there was no legislative basis for so doing. I will not say this is a panacea. I get that a lot of things go in behind affordability. I understand that zoning something affordable does not make it affordable and zoning something a green space does not make it a nice green space and so on. However, it would give local authority members a suite of measures through which they can try to engineer affordability and particularly into our urban settings. I ask the Minister of State to consider accepting the amendment.