Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as a bheith anseo inniu. I thank him and his officials for the detailed briefing we received on the Bill. It is a long and technical Bill. One aspect of it is that it seeks to raise the borrowing limit of the Housing Finance Agency, which is fine. However, the other aspects are quite technical and detailed. Deputy Ó Broin alluded to a recurring theme across Departments, not just the Department of housing, whereby the deadline for Committee Stage amendments to Bills is given before the Second Stage debate. I do not appreciate that and it does not set a good precedent. In many cases, Second Stage allows us to tease out queries, issues or concerns and have the Government respond to them. It allows us time to consider what amendments we might table. This Bill, which has 149 sections, is being rushed through the Dáil two weeks before the recess. I have been a TD for only a year and a half and this is the second time I have debated one of these amending planning and development Bills. I was not a Member of the previous Dáil but I was told that the huge 2024 planning Bill, which had 900-odd pages, was a panacea and that we would not need to revisit these issues. The Planning and Development Act 2000 was fundamentally good legislation. The issue was all the amendments that followed, which turned it into a unwieldy dog's dinner of an Act. I have a number of concerns about the Bill before us today, mainly relating to section 115, which inserts a new section 303A into the principal Act. These provisions deal with the judicial review changes. The Government would have us believe the planning system and judicial reviews are the biggest obstacles to housing delivery. That is not true. In fact, the biggest obstacles remain a lack of serviced land, inadequate infrastructure, soaring construction costs, labour shortages and the chopping and changing of Government policy. I support efficient planning. Nobody benefits from unnecessary delay. However, achieving greater speed cannot become an excuse for weakening transparency, accountability or access to justice. The proposed judicial review changes are troublesome. Judicial review exists for a reason. It is not there to frustrate development. It is there primarily to ensure public bodies follow the law. If the Government really wants to reduce delays, it must properly resource the courts and ensure planning authorities have adequate staffing - I will say more about that presently - to improve the quality of decision-making in the first place. Codifying the restrictions placed on public participation and potentially breaching our international legal obligations under the Aarhus Convention is not a road I want us to go down. The convention provides that environmental judicial reviews must not be prohibitively expensive or overtly restrictive. I have concerns that the stricter limits being placed on judicial review could breach that requirement. There is also a risk that removing the automatic right of appeal to the Court of Appeal, leaving only redress to the Supreme Court, could be unconstitutional. My concern is that instead of speeding up infrastructure delivery, which is the intention, we could end up with a wave of satellite litigation and spend years in court arguing over procedural technicalities. There are other aspects of this that are concerning. The whole idea of forcing courts, in effect, to police the corporate governance rules for volunteer-led community groups is a bit strange. The notion of shifting the responsibility of micromanaging community group governance to the courts system, thereby consuming valuable judicial time, does not make sense. The Government would have us believe planning is the principal obstacle to housing delivery, but it is not. Blaming judicial review for housing backlogs is a distraction. Data from the Law Society shows that the number of judicial reviews brought by individual citizens was already falling while the number of cases taken by commercial developers was increasing. I have concerns about the new section 138A, to be inserted in the principal Act by section 62, which deals with the relaxation of apartment standards. I fundamentally believe it is a race to the bottom to allow developers to shrink floor sizes, lower ceilings and reduce natural light. In effect, this is calling for smaller and darker apartments. I am concerned as well that these new lower standard apartments will disproportionately affect social housing tenants and renters, who are transient dwellers, by locking them into long-term inferior living conditions while developers maximise their profits. I also have a concern about the erosion of democratic oversight. By classifying these structural reductions as non-material modifications that only require a local authority certificate, the law effectively locks out the public. Neighbours and community groups have no right to review, object to or appeal these down-sized designs. These were, of course, rammed through. By eliminating minimum or maximum requirements for specific bedroom mixes, this policy actively incentivises a monoculture of small studio and one-bed units, again pushing families out of urban cores. The State committed a severe error by failing to conduct a strategic environmental assessment before introducing these lowered guidelines. The Government's constant changing of legal mechanisms to bypass court challenges has created massive regulatory uncertainty and delays in apartment delivery. I also want to talk about sections 21 and 42, which refer to adjusting the time for local authority development plan reviews and outline what will occur when elected officials fail to make a plan. The shift from six-year to ten-year development plans is a good idea but it is complex. This Bill allows current local development plans, made under the 2000 Act, to remain legally active on a transitional basis. I have concerns here regarding local government and the role of councillors. Handing ultimate power to central government, if councillors fail to make a plan, is again reducing the power and democratic influence of locally-elected representatives over zoning decisions. I want to move on and talk about planning in terms of planning posts and resourcing our local authorities. I would argue there are potential resourcing issues here because moving the goalposts for plan review simultaneously across multiple local authorities is logistically very complex. Through the CCMA, local authorities have voiced concern over the severe shortage of qualified planners to meet these compressed transitional deadlines. Replies to parliamentary questions I have received in recent months tell me that a fairly significant number of planners who have been reassigned to, or have been recruited from local authorities by, An Coimisiúin Pleanála. We need clarity from the Department as to how these critical vacancies will be back-filled at local authority level. I raise this because I have asked a number of parliamentary questions about planning posts. I cannot find out from the Department how these posts will be back-filled. The Department cannot tell me the workforce data for the local government planning sector because of section 159. It cannot tell me the percentage of current or senior executive planners who are eligible for retirement. When we look at the action plan on planning resources, the LGMA said a number of years ago that it needed 541 planning posts. Two hundred and forty four were sanctioned, which is not even half. When we look at phase 1 in 2023, that is fine but phase 2 did not actually come until 2025. The fact remains that a significant majority of council planning positions approved over the past two years remain unfilled due to a lack of available graduates and retention issues due to the fact that, in many cases, the local government sector cannot compete with the private sector on salaries. I have concerns about potential bottlenecks around the fact that a local development plan cannot be finalised until the regional spatial and economic strategy, RSES is complete. There is a 90-week deadline on regional reviews. I hope there is not any delay at regional assembly level because that will set off a domino effect for local authorities. I want to talk about section 149, which has to do with the increase in the Housing Finance Agency, HFA, borrowing limit. I have no issue with this; I support it. It is also the second time we have done it in the past year. I would argue that it does not go far enough and that the State needs to invest more in the direct delivery of social and affordable housing. Given that we only extended the borrowing cap in quarter 4 of last year, I would like the Government to take a longer-term review of the remit of the HFA and its borrowing ceiling and to look at the borrowing cap of all 31 local authorities, which is far too low. As I said, I support efficient planning. I do not think anybody benefits from unnecessary delay but we must have proper planning and that is a fact. I cannot support apartment changes that make developments cheaper by making homes smaller and reducing amenities and design standards. We have already paid the price for poor planning decisions in relation to apartments, when we consider that virtually everything built during the Celtic-tiger period is in some way defective. Every apartment built today should be a home that somebody can comfortably live in permanently. We, in Labour, have consistently argued that once again, the State must become a major builder of housing. We cannot continue to rely on a volatile private market to solve a crisis that the market itself has failed repeatedly to solve. We need to empower local authorities more. We need to better support the AHB sector, and I will go into that. We also need to look at establishing a State construction company. We need to invest more in modern methods of construction. We need a stable, predictable and properly resourced planning system. In some of the time available to me, I want to talk about the issues with the cost rental equity loan, CREL, scheme. I have had a decent bit of engagement with the AHB sector, as I am sure the Department has, around the 40-year repayment period. Due to soaring construction costs, many in the AHB sector are saying that this is making cost rental unviable for them. We have AHBs that are pulling the plug on cost-rental developments because the are saying they are not viable. However, at the same time, the way the cost-rental system was designed here means that it is not proper cost rental; it is market discount. We now have a situation where rents in the cost-rental sector are far too high. Yes, they are 29% lower, on average, than on the open market but they are still too high and they need to come down. In the first instance, the Government needs to look at the equity element of the CREL to make sure more cost-rental developments do not end up being pulled. As I said, I will engage constructively with this Bill. Where there are measures in it that I believe will accelerate housing delivery, while protecting the integrity of proper planning, I will support them. However, where the Government seeks to weaken safeguards, reduce standards and continues to not address the real barriers to housing delivery, then I will continue to challenge that.

Sentiment score: 0.04