Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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274. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the way in which the national planning framework will deal with surpluses of planned capacities for growth that exists in the strategic planning areas of the planning regions (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3194/17]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Significant progress has been made in recent years in addressing the issue of excessive zoning of lands within the planning process, particularly for housing, through the introduction of Core Strategies now required for all local authority development plans under Section 10(2A) of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as amended by the Planning and Development (Amendment) Act 2010. In 2011, my Department received a report from the then Regional Authorities on Regional Planning Guidelines implementation which indicated that, prior to the introduction of the above amendment, 41,788 hectares of land in total had been zoned for housing, sufficient for the provision of 1.1 million new homes or an additional population of 2.64 million people, including in certain in appropriate and poorly serviced locations.

This level of over-zoning was unwarranted, was too often based on aspirational planning, without regard for wider implications as to if or how all these lands could be developed over time and would have presented huge difficulties in terms of the co-ordination of future development and the associated services and infrastructure provision.

Following the introduction of amending provisions in the 2010 Act and drawing from guidance in the National Spatial Strategy and Regional Planning Guidelines, local authorities rapidly reviewed their development plans and local area plans such that the level of lands zoned and prioritised for housing as Phase 1 lands with in their statutory plans was scaled back to 11,113 hectares, or lands sufficient to provide for around 300,000 new dwellings, which would equate to approximately 12 years ' supply, in the context of the Economic and Social Research Institute's estimate of the new housing requirement of 25,000 units per annum.

The excess lands were either de-zoned or changed zoning objective to another appropriate use such as employment and amenity lands, or were identified for later phases of development, pending the utilisation of all lands zoned for priority development.

My Department monitors all city and county development plans and local area plans to secure broad alignment between the National Spatial Strategy, which will be succeeded later this year with the new National Planning Framework, and Regional Planning Guidelines last published in 2010 and local authority statutory plans.

My Department is currently engaged in technical analysis of the 2016 Census in the context of providing medium-to longer- term national and regional population and housing requirement estimates for the National Planning Framework, which, in turn, will inform new Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies (RSES), succeeding the existing Planning Guidelines. I will give consideration to advancing interim guidance to planning authorities on the appropriate population estimates that their statutory plans should provide for, in advance of the publication of the RSESs later this year, and on foot of the publication of the National Planning Framework, so that statutory plans reflect the latest Census data and plan pro-actively for the future on a sound and integrated basis.

More generally, my Department is satisfied that as regards the major metropolitan areas, in particular, where new housing demand is most acute, the existing round of Regional Planning Guidelines continue to provide a reasonable basis for planning for growth and housing provision and for consideration of housing proposals by planning authorities and An Bord Pleanála, ahead of updated guidelines being finalised.