I would like to start by thanking the officials from the planning section of the Department who facilitated a detailed briefing for members of the Oireachtas committee on Monday. I am deeply disappointed with what I consider to be the disrespectful way in which the Government has introduced and intends to proceed with this Bill. The Minister of State said "With the support of both Houses and with your co-operation, I hope to have this Bill enacted before the summer recess." We will have no say in that enactment. The Government has already decided that the Bill is going to be railroaded through the Houses in a matter of days. Given the complexity of the legislation in front of us, its impact on our planning system and, on foot of that, the impact that will be felt by hundreds of thousands of people, I have to say that what is proposed is wholly inadequate. The Government has allocated four and a half hours for the Second Stage debate. That is fine, but two hours for Committee and Remaining Stages next week to scrutinise a Bill that runs to 83 pages is wholly inadequate. The Bill was published on Friday last. As the Minister of State outlined, it is very technical in nature. The amendment deadline for Committee Stage it was 11 o'clock this morning, before we even had the benefit of the Second Stage debate. Earlier, the Business Committee agreed to the tiny amount of time allocated for the debate next week. This means that those sections of the Bill that were subject to pre-legislative scrutiny will not be subject to any meaningful committee scrutiny next week. That, in itself, is problematic, but there are considerable sections of this Bill that are new, that were not included in the general scheme and that were not subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. They will be the subject of no scrutiny whatsoever. We want to get the opportunity to bring in impacted parties, professionals and other experts to give us their views. The problem with what is happening is that we have a long history in this House of Government rushing through technical and complex planning legislation at the tail end of Dáil terms. Because we do not take the time to scrutinise such legislation, mistakes and errors are made. Substitute consent is the best example of that. The legislation had to be revisited and reintroduced a year afterwards because of the mess that was made. When I say "mess", I want to very clear. I am not in any way criticising officials in the planning section of the Department because they work hard and do their job very professionally, but when they are put under unrealistic timelines by the Government, when they and the Members of this House are not afforded the opportunity to scrutinise and hear other opinion, bad legislation is made, bad outcomes arise and legislation has to be revisited. I say this about a Bill many aspects of which I am not opposed to. Not only is it disrespectful to this House, but it is deeply disrespectful to the members of the Oireachtas housing committee, of which the Minister of State was previously a member, because we are not being afforded the opportunity to undertake the job to scrutinise legislation from the Government, a job that we take seriously. There is also the irony that when the then Minister, Deputy O'Brien, announced in 2022 that he was going to do a once-in-a-generation reform of planning legislation, one of the primary reasons was because, in the 20 years following the passage of the planning Act in 2000, there had been so many amending pieces of legislation that the Act was unwieldy. It was too complex, cumbersome and difficult to navigate. He then undertook process whereby he took a Bill of 700 pages that ended up at 1,000 pages long, with all of the amendments during 2024. If I am not wrong, this is now the second piece of amending legislation of that "once-in-a-generation" rewrite of our planning law, the purpose of which was to do away with the need for constant revisions and amendments. Are we going to get one of these amending Bills every year? We had one last year. It passed through the House and was much shorter than this one, which is more substantive. Sure, some of the sections of this Bill are corrections, but not all. There are lots of substantive elements in this Bill, which I am going to deal with now, and it is not lost on people, particularly the professional planners out there who have to make and adjudicate on applications, that the system is probably more complicated and cumbersome today as a result of the then Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, and his successor, Deputy James Browne's poor efforts. I will run through some of the key general concerns I have with the Bill. The proposed amendments to Part 3 relate to plan-making, which was one of the areas of the 2024 Act that we were generally in agreement with. We wanted to move to more plan-making, including ten-year plans, to create a consistency between regional, county and local plans. The real issue here, however, is that unless there is a proper multi-annual workforce plan to give our planning authorities the staff that they told the Government back in 2023 they needed, all of these new provisions will fall foul of the inability of our local authorities, through no fault of their own, to have the dedicated staff to do the plan-making. In my local authority area, we are dealing with the city edge project, which the Minister of State's officials know very well because they were before our local authority previously. We have just made some very ambitious decisions in terms of substantial extensions to Adamstown through material variations. There are new master plans on the cards for the coming years for Adamstown south and west, and Grange Castle. How are we going to get our planning authorities to move into the space where they have sufficient time and capacity to develop these kinds of plan when the number of additional staff sanctioned so far has been substantially less than what the County and City Management Association, CCMA, told us in 2023 they needed? There is no multi-annual plan not just to employ, but to recruit the planners whom planning authorities need. While I have no objection to the sections of the Bill that propose to amend Part 3 of the Act, in the absence of a parallel and clear multi-annual workforce plan to train, recruit, attract and employ the planners that we need, it is going to be very difficult to achieve these objectives. With respect to the amendments to Part 9 on judicial reviews, and as I said when the Act was making its way through the House in 2023 and 2024 and during the pre-legislative scrutiny of the general scheme of this Bill, I am concerned that there is a real risk that this could lead to increased litigation and project delay. I hope I am wrong, but the only way we are going to know is if there is regular reporting by the Department to the Oireachtas housing committee to demonstrate the outworking of this legislation. I invite the Minister of State to discuss with the Minister, James Browne, and the officials introducing some reporting mechanism, perhaps every six months, to the Oireachtas housing committee so that we can track the progress. This means that if the Bill does what the Government intends it to do, we could congratulate the Government and say "Job well done". I would have no difficulty doing that, rare and all as such a thing occurs. However, if it leads to increased litigation and delays, as some of us fear but none of us wants, we would be able to highlight that. The amendments also ignore the fact that the biggest obstacle to the timely expediting of judicial reviews is that we only have three judges in the Planning and Environment Court. We need at least six. Given the resources available to the Government, it is not within the realms of impossibility that the number of judges could be doubled, they could be provided with some additional back room staff and support, and, crucially, the good practice guidelines of the court would be put on a statutory footing so that we would have statutory timelines for judicial reviews depending on size and complexity. We have statutory timelines for some elements of our planning process, although not as many as there should be. There should be for judicial reviews, too. With respect to the amendments to Part 4 on the infrastructural task force, this is one of those areas where our committee could have played a useful role in inviting in external experts, such as the utilities, our planning authorities, the Irish Planning Institute and others, to give their views on these proposed changes to the Act. All of us want to see increased and accelerated delivery of critical underlying infrastructure, which these amendments broadly deal with, but also of public amenities and public services like transport, schools and health facilities, all of which are sorely lacking in those parts of the State where there is increased residential development. One of the big disappointments of this Part is that it does not deal with the thorny issue of parallel consent. We raised this with the Department's officials during the course of our briefing. The utilities have been crying out for parallel consents to speed up the process for years. Whether they require foreshore licences or Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, licences as well as planning consents, there should be a single standardised format where those consents and grants can be applied for in parallel rather than consecutively, which is the case currently and adds considerable periods of time to the process. In principle, I am not against the definitions of material contraventions here and elsewhere in the Bill, but our committee did not scrutinise them and there was no public airing to examine whether those definitions were correct or would cause difficulties. That is a missed opportunity. I am not against the idea in principle, but the Government is doing itself and the State a disservice as a consequence. I am fundamentally opposed to the amendments to Part 4 dealing with alterations to existing apartment planning permissions. As the Minister of State knows, I was a strong critic of the revised design standards when they were issued as section 28 guidelines last year and as draft planning policy statements this year, in part because they had all the same pitfalls and challenges of the former Minister, Eoghan Murphy's previous section 28 guidelines. They are not good standards for the development of good urban environments or good and well-planned communities. That is not just my view. That is the view of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and the Irish Planning Institute, as well as many professional architects and planners. As we heard in the housing committee only a couple of weeks ago, the irony is that the alleged savings that were to be introduced as a consequence of those inferior design standards have already been taken over by inflation. Despite the fact that renters are going to get smaller and darker apartments with less storage and communal space, the savings that were meant to be provided are gone and because the Government has decided to remove any protections on rent controls between tenancies, those tenants will be paying ever greater rents. This is a retrograde step that will come back to bite the Government badly in the time ahead, but as is always the cases with these matters, it will be renters who bear the burden of that. Notwithstanding all of those criticisms, and the Minister of State was not surprised by any of them, there is an obligation on the Government to periodically report back to our committee on the operation of these particular sections in terms of the number of alterations that are sought, the nature and detail of those alterations, whether they actually result in commencements of new homes, and the types, quality and price of those. I suspect the Government will not do that because it is going to be nervous about proper public scrutiny of the negative outcome of that particular policy proposition that it introduced last year and is advancing further here. The argument is going to be that this measure will help to activate apartment developments that otherwise would not be built. Let us wait and see. I genuinely do not believe it will have that impact, and even where it does have that impact, marginal and all as it is, it will have very negative impacts on renters in terms of size, quality and, crucially, cost. I would like the Minister of State, whether today or on Committee Stage next week, to talk in more detail about the provisions of the Bill that deal with the derelict sites levy and its interaction with the residential zoned land tax. That would benefit from some public airing. With respect to the Housing Finance Agency, HFA, that was on the cards and is very welcome. Here is the problem. The additional funding from the Housing Finance Agency is only of benefit if approved housing bodies, AHBs, through the capital assistance scheme, CAS, the capital advance leasing facility, CALF, and the cost rental equity loan, CREL, can scale up the delivery of social and, crucially, affordable homes in the time ahead. I am strongly of the view that there is an increasing crisis of viability in the operation of the cost rental equity loan. It was badly designed at the outset and, increasingly, delivering projects is proving difficult under it. What we also know is that the projects it is delivering are far too expensive for the overwhelming majority of people for whom cost rental was originally designed, those just above the thresholds for social housing and unable to access market housing. On average, for example, 29% of the applicants for Land Development Agency, LDA, schemes are refused solely on the affordability grounds, and for the three-bed units, in many cases, it is as high as 50%. The figure is similar for the AHB sector. I urge the Minister of State, in the context of the increase in the lending ceiling for the Housing Finance Agency, to fix the problems with CREL. CAS and CALF have a separate problem, which is the inadequacy of the payment and availability agreement, or the management agreement in the case of CAS. That is going to become an increasing constraint on the ability of the AHBs to develop additional schemes and draw down the HFA funding that the Government is making available today. Of course, the crazy thing is that for cost rental, local authorities can borrow from the Housing Finance Agency at a lower rate of interest than AHBs, so much so that when the former chief executive of the HFA came in front of our committee, he indicated that the difference in borrowing could result in a lower rent of at least €100 a month. Yet, despite the fact that local authorities could deliver larger volumes of lower priced cost rental, the borrowing cap that has been placed by the Department of housing and, ultimately, the Government on the local government sector is hampering it beyond belief. For example, Dublin City Council is working on the cost rental project at St. Michael’s, but that is going to blow its ability to borrow for any other schemes at any other stage. There has to be a sensible conversation. I am not talking about reckless borrowing or no limits, but there has to be a conversation in government and with the Oireachtas committee about changing that ceiling and giving greater flexibility to local authorities to borrow. With the indulgence of the Chair, I will make two further comments. Yesterday, the Government published the draft planning policy statement for rural and Gaeltacht houses. Many of us had been waiting for that statement to be published for a long time. It is noted that, unlike the publication of the draft policy statement for design standards, the Government has not announced any formal public consultation or invitation for sectoral organisations to make submissions while it is doing the strategic and environmental assessments - the appropriate assessment - and before they are incorporated into the city and county development plans. Nor is there any indication of whether the Government is going to request the Oireachtas housing committee to give its scrutiny to these matters. I urge the Minister of State to talk to the line Minister. Between the assessments and the reworking into the development plans, these rules are not going to come into effect until the end of this year, at the earliest. A shortened, time-bound, formal consultation with the sectors and our committee could help to strengthen them. There are some very real concerns about aspects of these. The Minister of State will know of these through his own backbenchers and because sectoral organisations are raising them. We want to get these planning guidelines right, and consultation is required. Today, the Department issued the circular to local authorities on the new transfer protocol for victims and survivors of domestic and gender-based violence to be able to move from one local authority to another and take their years on the waiting lists with them. This is something we have been calling for over many years, and I warmly welcome it. However, there is a problem. It only applies to households on local authority housing waiting lists and does not apply to households in receipt of housing assistance payment, HAP, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS. Almost half the potential households that will desperately need this vital protection are excluded from the protocol. I understand that there are some challenges because those people are on the transfer lists of their local authorities, but there are no grounds on which a woman and children who are today experiencing domestic or gender-based violence, and who are in HAP accommodation, should be precluded from availing of the protocol. I see the Minister of State has a quizzical look on his face. I have checked this. It has been confirmed to me today that it does not apply to women trying to escape domestic and gender-based violence who are on HAP or RAS. The only reason I am raising it is to urge the Minister of State to act. This is a valuable move. It is one of those rare occasions where I want to be able to commend the Government, but if half of the potential households that need this are being excluded, the Government needs to go back and fix it very quickly. There are times when we come in here and it does not matter how much scrutiny or how much debating time there is because we are not going to agree with the Government. There are also times when legislation is brought forward on which there is very little politics to be played and very few votes to be got. Planning legislation is typically that kind of legislation. I cannot emphasise enough, and I think I speak for all colleagues in the Opposition who take our scrutiny role in committee very seriously, that to allow two hours for Committee and Report Stages for a Bill of 83 pages is wholly unacceptable. In that time, we have to try to discuss the Bill and invite the Minister of State to explain, clarify and, in some cases, justify elements as well as consider reasonable amendments. It is frustrating that every year, at the end of a term, this is what we are left with. I urge the Government to reconsider, although I do not think it will. Then we will decide as we go through the Bill next week how we proceed on Final Stage.

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