Pat Casey (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State and wish him the best of luck in his role. Hopefully, he will bring the energy he brought to the Senate when we had housing debates to his current position. Fianna Fáil supports this motion to approve the revised NPF. This framework is set to create the conditions necessary for accelerated housing delivery across Ireland. This approval follows a thorough revision process of the NPF that has been ongoing since June 2023.

This milestone decision sets a clear direction for Ireland's growth and development up to 2040. It establishes a policy environment designed to unlock potential and address critical priorities, particularly in housing, infrastructure and climate action. The revised NPF will directly inform the broader Government policy agenda. It will guide the actions of a wide range of public and private entities, including home builders, the renewable energy sector, infrastructure agencies and domestic and international investors. Ireland is in dire need of a significant shift in housing delivery. With the revised NPF and the new Planning and Development Act being implemented this year, we are ensuring that the essential conditions for accelerated delivery of new homes are embedded within our planning system.

The need to accelerate housing delivery is paramount and this is where I wish to make some observations and express concerns regarding the NPF, particularly the implication roadmap that will follow this publication. This roadmap will contain the prescribed details necessary for effective execution. As a Senator who participated throughout the entire process of the current NPF, I vividly recall my engagement with Niall Cussen, my concerns around the population target, the population distribution, its misalignment of infrastructure availability, the necessity for local flexibility and the top-down approach in adopting county development plans. I will raise some of the issues I raised then that are pertinent to the discussion today. These concerns must be addressed in the roadmap to ensure successful implementation. I was a member of the Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage when the first NPF was introduced. The significant difference between the NPF and the national spatial strategy was that it was put on a legal footing. This was significant. After that, the Office of the Planning Regulator was set up. This was the enforcer of the NPF. This has led to complications and possibly over-prescribed figures and too much of an onus on a core strategy and a table within a development plan.I have no issue whatsoever with the general policies within the NPF. The strategy of compact growth whereby we want to try to achieve 40% nationally - 50% in the cities and 30% elsewhere - is a good policy. However, that policy is protracted and takes a lot longer. We are dealing with brownfield sites and we could be dealing with sites with environmental issues. It takes a lot longer to deliver on that. Perhaps when the Government is looking at reviewing its housing policy, it might look to see what is necessary to actually deliver that because that is where we would create a sustainable environment.

In the area of population, I recognise that the revised NPF projects an additional 950,000 in population growth up to 2040. This does not correlate with objective No. 42, which is to deliver 50,000 houses per annum per year to 2040. The average household size according to the census was 2.74. If we even take a lower figure of 2.4, that is a population of 1.68 million. There is a significant difference there and we need to try to focus in on how we address that. I already accept that the roadmap can introduce the headroom space, which in the current one is 50%. However, even if we look at the 50% that is in the current one, in my constituency and in Leinster, the population exceeded in 2022 what was projected in 2026. We cannot allow that to happen again because that has unintended consequences, specifically in Wicklow. I will probably focus in on that later. Around that population, we must get it right. Let us not make the development plan so prescriptive that it is preventing the delivery of housing.

With regard to the distribution of population, Niall and I had a humdinger on this many years ago and I still cannot accept it today. Fine, I fully understand and appreciate we need our levels - level 1, level 2 and level 3 towns. However, there is absolutely no point in allocating 32% of a county's population growth to a level 1 town that does not have the infrastructure required to deliver that population growth, while in the same county there are other towns that have the infrastructure available and that can deliver but are capped because they are at a much lower percentage population growth. We need to focus in and take account, and maybe leave some discretion for our local councillors to manipulate those figures. In Wicklow, we have now refused five significant planning applications for residential developments, two of which, sadly, were on core strategy, because they exceeded the population target of that town. In Wicklow town now, where we are, we have refused two planning applications on R2 lands despite all the R1 lands having been completed on the very same site. We are currently now doing a variation of the Wicklow town environs plan, which is only allowing us to grow the population by an additional 3,000 until 2031. I can tell the Minister of State right now that those houses are already being built, so before we even adopt this new plan, our population figures are out of date. In fact, when we adopted our 2022 county development plan, 16 of our 21 towns were already exceeding this 2031 target. We need to make sure that does not happen again. We need to make sure we allocate population growth to where we have the infrastructure today. There is no point, while we have it, waiting ten years and then using it. The other example was in Arklow in Wicklow. We just spent €149 million on a brand new wastewater treatment plant. It increased the population growth by another 22,500. The NPF is telling us we can build 80 houses per year for the next ten years. At that rate of going, it will take us 154 years to reach the capacity of the new wastewater treatment plant. That is the example. We should be able to take the population from where we cannot deliver it into areas where we can deliver it.

With regard to the whole area of democracy, this has completely removed the power of the councillors. We have left them with absolutely no flexibility. I will revert back to the Wicklow town plan that has just been amended. Councillors proposed 14 amendments to that county development plan. Eight of them were to zone R2 lands to R1 because we had already reached our targets. Every one of the 14 amendments the councillors proposed has come back from the Office of the Planning Regulator, OPR, with the administration saying it exceeds core strategy.It comes back to this single table in a document that is so prescriptive. Even though those towns I mentioned have the services and transport, we are saying they cannot build houses there because they are exceeding the population target within that document. The language that is used in the roadmap will be critical if we are going to overcome this because there are opportunities. We need to sweat the assets where we have the assets. We need to follow the population where the assets are today, not where they might be in ten years' time, while preventing towns to grow.