Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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766.To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government to outline the growth in population and in the housing stock from 2016 to 2022 across the regional categories identified in the National Planning Framework 2018, across Dublin and its suburbs, across each of the four other cities and their suburbs, and across each of the three regions (East and Midlands, North and Western, and Southern); and the extent to which the distribution of that growth has deviated from the midpoint target distributions for the entire period to 2040 set out in the National Planning Framework 2018, in tabular form.[35693/24]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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A cornerstone policy of both the existing and the proposed revised National Planning Framework (NPF) is the achievement of a greater regional balance in population and employment growth. The goal is to see a roughly 50:50 distribution of growth between the Eastern and Midland region, and the respective Southern, and Northern and Western Regions, with 75% of the growth to take place outside of Dublin and its suburbs.

Specific housing targets for urban and rural areas in each local authority functional area are currently set out in the respective Core Strategies of the 31 City and County Development Plans (as may be applicable) having regard to the hierarchy of settlements of different scales in each local authority area and informed by the targets contained in the 2018 NPF and reflected in the Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies.

A breakdown of housing delivery across the three Regions from 2016 to 2022 inclusive, is set down in Table A.

Regional Targets

A key target in the NPF is more balanced regional development and this is reflected in the objective to match the level of growth in the EMRA region with the two other regions – effectively a ‘50/50 growth split’. The longer run trend has seen significantly more growth in the EMRA region, for example, the results from Census 2016 indicated a 70/30 growth split.

The recent results from Census 2022 shows a closer alignment with this NPF objective. There was a national population increase of c.390,000, and c.175,000 of this growth occurred in the two regional areas outside of the EMRA region, a proportional split of 55%/45%.

City Targets

City-based population and employment growth is an important target for the NPF. NPO2(a) of the strategy sets“A target of half (50%) of future population and employment growth will be focused in the existing five cities and their suburbs”as a means of ensuring cities deliver as ‘accessible centres of scale’. The proportion of national population growth achieved in the period to 2022 in the five cities was 124,543 persons or 32% of overall growth.

In order to achieve the overall increase in city-based population growth, the NPF sets ambitious growth targets to enable the four cities of Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford to each grow by at least 50% to 2040. Census 2022 shows a mixed performance for the cities—only Waterford (+12%) and Limerick (+8%) had a growth rate above the national average of 8%. Both Galway and Cork grew at a rate below the national average.

Details can be found in Table B.

TABLE A

TABLE B