I move amendment No. 1: In page 10, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following: “Report on impact of amendments related to Judicial Reviews 4.The Minister shall lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas within 12 months of the commencement of this Act detailing the impact of the amendments to Part 4 of the Principal Act related to Judicial Reviews and detailing whether the procedural changes have resulted in a speeding up of planning related Judicial Reviews or increased the volume of planning litigation resulting in increased delays for residential and infrastructural development.”. This is a poor way of progressing a complex and technical piece of planning legislation. It is unlike the Bill we have just disposed of, in respect of which we had three dedicated committee sessions and were able to interact with ministerial colleagues and officials. While not successful in changing any of the Bill, we were able to obtain significant clarifications. Essentially, we are being given two hours to do Committee and Remaining Stages of an 83-page Bill. In this format, on the floor of the Dáil, it is incredibly difficult to do the work that many of us would like to do. I am not going to dignify the way in which the Government is rushing this through by attempting to conduct Committee Stage, because this format is not conducive to doing so. I know the Minister of State, Deputy Cummins, will not accept the amendment, but there are concerns that the proposed alterations to judicial review could result in increased litigation. My primary concern is that, as a consequence of the relevant sections of the Bill, there will be increased litigation and, therefore, increased delays. We are asking for the Minister and his officials to track how this operates over the next 12 to 24 months and report back to our committee in some form or another. I do not want to waste people’s time in having an argument about an amendment that the Minister of State is clearly not going to accept. However, I think he will be able to accept the principle that if the changes the Government is making have the unintended consequence of increasing litigation and causing delay to much-needed critical infrastructure, housing or renewable energy projects, they will be monitored and, if necessary, legislative amendments will be brought forward to rectify those problems into the future.
Sentiment score: -0.05
I move amendment No. 2: In page 10, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following: “Report on impact of amendments related to alteration of existing planning permissions 4.The Minister shall lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas every 6 months from the commencement of this Act detailing the impact of the amendments to Part 4 of the Principal Act related to alterations of existing planning permissions and detailing the location, nature and volume of such alterations by project and local authority area and the resulting commencement of developments that have secured the alterations.”. The Minister of State has been in this House for long enough to know it is highly irregular for an amending deadline for Committee Stage to be held before the Second Stage debate. The reason we have Second Stage, Committee Stage, and Report and Final Stages is because we come into the Chamber, debate the Bill, and consider the matters in front of us. Having done that, we submit amendments which are ordinarily taken with detailed scrutiny in Committee where we can go through details of the legislation. That is the ordinary procedure. What the Minister of State did in this instance was to publish an 83-page Bill of highly technical changes to planning law on a Friday. I acknowledge we got a very good, detailed briefing from the Minister of State’s officials and we have thanked them for that but we had an amendment deadline at 11 a.m. on a Thursday before Second Stage. The Minister of State gave four hours for Second Stage but the really important part after the speeches is committee scrutiny of the legislation. The idea that somehow the Minister of State speaking to an empty Chamber at the end of four hours in any way negates the argument that giving us just two hours, not having had an adequate opportunity to submit amendments after Second Stage. is the norm is just not true. From my long experience in this House, when detailed, technical planning legislation entailing changes to our planning codes - including sections of this Bill that I fully support, because there are elements of this Bill in which the intention is absolutely fine – is introduced in a very rushed manner without adequate scrutiny, particularly Committee Stage scrutiny in this House, unintended consequences arise. We have had occasion after occasion of this in the past decade. Officials are put under undue pressure to meet unrealistic deadlines and the technical outworkings of the Bill are challenging. In the real world, the Bill then does not do what the Government said it would. That is a fact. This is a bad way to make legislation and if the Minister of State does not agree, it is something he needs to carefully consider because this will affect his constituents as much as it will mine. There are no votes to be got from technical discussions around planning legislation; I learned that a long time ago, but this stuff is really important and to do it in this way is the wrong way to do it. With respect to this amendment - and I want to pick up on the response to the last amendment - the Department is introducing a set of changes. This amendment relates to sections 62 and 63, which the Department hopes will result in an acceleration of apartment delivery. It is hoping to have an outcome but saying it is not its job to monitor whether the legislation has those outcomes but that of the Office of the Planning Regulator, the board, or whoever else. All we are saying is it is not unreasonable to ask the Department to track the impact of the legislation it passes to see if it has had the intended consequence or not. This amendment refers to the relevant sections. I apologise in advance if my technical proficiency is not as good as that of the Minister of State’s expert officials. These sections are meant to be about accelerating delivery of apartments. The Department is creating a facility whereby people who have planning permissions will be able to significantly alter them in line with new apartment design standards, which are not yet law themselves, in terms of the planning policy statement before the courts. All I am asking the Minister of State to do - I accept he cannot accept the amendment - is to take some responsibility for the changes he is proposing and monitor them. If they have the intended impact the Minister of State is saying he wants them to have, he can come into our committee and say “Opposition, you got it wrong. We told you it was a good idea and it was going to work and here is the evidence.” The real reason the Department does not want to track these things is not because they are somebody else's responsibility. It is because if it tracks them and reports them to the committee and if they do not have the intended consequence, we will highlight that the Government got it wrong. That is the real issue. I am not going to labour the point but I think the spirit of this amendment is one the Minister of State should endeavour to embrace, notwithstanding the fact that he opposes the letter of it. If not, we will continue to raise these matters and whether through freedom of information requests or parliamentary questions - which the Ceann Comhairle knows we are very persistent about - we will get the information one way or another. How about just a little bit of transparency, accountability and reporting to the Oireachtas committee, which is part of our function, whether this legislation has good consequences, no consequences or, as many of us fear, negative consequences, particularly for the people who will be affected by the changes in the Bill?
Sentiment score: 0.08
The amendment is a device to allow us to raise the substantive issue, which is whether the Department going to be tracking this. Is that the Minister of State's intention? He is bringing forward amendments to the Planning and Development Act, a Bill on which we spent considerable time and have very different views, which was meant to end the practice of the constant amending of legislation. The reason that review was initiated, as the Minister of State knows, was that the 2000 Act had been amended so many times, it became unwieldy. Here we are and we do not even have the full 2024 Act commenced, yet this is the second amending Bill to it and there will be more. Will the Minister of State at least confirm it is his intention to ensure his officials report back to him over that two-year period? Will he commit to sharing that information with our committee and giving us an opportunity to scrutinise it at whatever interval he thinks appropriate? That is the very least he could do to ensure full transparency with what is a controversial measure in the Bill. Whether one agrees with it is a separate issue we will deal with when we get to section 62, but some monitoring, publishing and accountability would be in everybody's interest.
Sentiment score: 0.26
Sure.
Sentiment score: 0.32
In 2018, Eoghan Murphy was the Minister for housing. At that point there was a very strong lobby coming from a section of the development community that apartment building was not viable and the problem was that design standards and building height restrictions introduced by our local authorities were making schemes non-viable. Eoghan Murphy introduced a series of section 28 mandatory ministerial guidelines on apartment design standards and, separately, on building heights. His justification was almost word for word the justification the Minister of State just gave, which was that if this got one apartment development built that would not otherwise have been built, it would be worthwhile. The problem is what happened after that. The first thing that happened was a series of conflicts between the Minister's statutory section 28 guidelines and our existing city and county development plans. When there are two sets of rules, planning decisions end up being fought out in the courts. Initially, Dublin City Council sought to defend, in relation to a number of highly controversial developments, its planning decisions and statutory plans. In a few years, we went from having virtually no judicial reviews, JRs, of large residential developments to having an explosion of them. When I first came into the House, it was unheard of for people to judicially review residential developments, particularly estate developments. The misuse of the section 28 ministerial guidelines created conditions for a slew of JRs. What was the consequence of those JRs? Stuff did not get built. Some of those JRs are still lodged in the courts because of the failure of Government to get a grip on that. The lesson is when bad changes are made to planning law, it does not increase the volume of development. The second lesson is that when bad changes are made to planning law, even if stuff gets built, the stuff is of inferior quality. These are people's homes. These are places where places are meant to grow, have children, flourish and feel safe and secure. So bad a mess of our apartment-planning system did Eoghan Murphy make that Deputy Darragh O'Brien as Minister was forced by the weight of evidence to do what many of us in the Oireachtas housing committee in 2017 and 2018 had urged Simon Coveney and then Eoghan Murphy to do, which was to revert to a situation where there was one set of design standards, not two, and where local authorities continued to be the primary decision-makers of planning applications, with an appeal to the board. As a consequence of him introducing under pressure what many of us had argued for for a long time, the number of JRs of large-scale residential developments plummeted. Now, thankfully, there are very few. The one thing the Minister of State and I agree on in this is we want to see fewer JRs. I want to see more good-quality planning decisions made by our planning authorities for public and private sector developers. They have to get on with the job. Imagine our surprise when the Minister for housing, Deputy Browne, this week last year announced that he was going to repeat Eoghan Murphy's fatal error of 2018 and was going to use the same failed section 28 procedure to introduce a new set of design standards for apartments. It beggars belief, albeit that some of the details of the new procedure are different, that he would run the risk of repeating the very same mistakes as his predecessor. As the Minister of State knows, that section 28 guideline has been subject to a legal challenge. I am not involved in the legal challenge and do not have an opinion of it. Others can speak to that. Since the legal challenge clearly has some weight, notwithstanding the fact that the Government's current position is that the section 28 guidelines are the law, the Minister and Minister of State then decided to gazump their own guidelines with what I think is the first use of the new and highly controversial so-called national planning policy statements that were published a month or so ago and are currently out for public consultation. My big fear - issue number one - is this. Design standards are there for a reason. They are there to ensure that, within each development, there is an appropriate mix of studios, one-beds and two-beds, an adequate amount of natural light and storage for long-term living, an adequate amount of community amenity, and so on. Those things are there for a reason. To reduce those standards in a manner that runs the risk of seeing increased litigation, not just of the section 28 rules themselves in the first instance but of individual planning applications, is quite reckless. The more substantive point is that the Minister of State is saying that, in order to fix the housing crisis, renters will have to live in smaller, darker, less well designed apartments. If we add into the mix the other policy innovation that the Minister announced this time last year and was enacted earlier this year, those renters will not be subject to any meaningful rent controls at all and will therefore pay the highest possible rents. That is not a credible solution to the housing crisis. To make matters even worse, it is provided in sections 61 and 62 of the Bill and their related sections that, where a developer had secured planning permission already under the existing rules, they will now be able to go back and, through a relatively simplified procedure, seek to alter that planning permission in line with the new design standards. Keep in mind that those design standards are currently in front of the courts and undergoing a public consultation. Those design standards have a very considerable amount of uncertainty around them right now. In fact, if I was a developer, I would be very reluctant to use those design standards, given their legal uncertainty and because of the risk that the mismanagement of the section 28 guidelines last year and the planning policy statement this year has created. Who has done that? The Minister of State and his lead Minister have. As the Minister of State knows, I am against the section 28 guidelines. They were a terrible mistake. I do not agree with the repackaging of those in the planning policy statement put out for public consultation. I am opposed to these provisions of the Bill. There was a time in this country - the Minister of State is too young to remember it - where anything could be built because all that mattered was building stuff. We have learned at great cost the legacy of that. If you literally allow anything to be built without adequate attention to standards, in this case design standards, what you get is poor-quality, expensive homes that the Minister of State and I would not live in, so why should we expect hard-working people, contributing to society and taxes, to live in them either? In the vast majority of cases, renters will tell us that they want a pathway out of the private rental sector. They want more homes to own. They want more social or affordable homes, not smaller, darker, ever more expensive apartments. This entire episode over the last 12 months has been a classic case of the Government repeating the very bad mistakes of the past. It runs the risk of having the same negative impact on planning, development, delivery and, crucially, the standards and quality of the homes the Minister of State is expecting people to live in into the future. On that basis, I am strongly opposing both sections 61 and 62. To save time, I am not going to repeat my speech when we get to the second section. Both sections are bad planning at their very worst and I make no apology for opposing them.
Sentiment score: -0.11
I could not possibly comment on the Ceann Comhairle's age.
Sentiment score: 0.00
That was a compliment to the Minister of State, by the way.
Sentiment score: 0.48
The Deputies are all very young. I do not mind saying it.
Sentiment score: 0.00
The Minister of State is just provoking me so I will allow myself to be provoked. The real issue is that if one apartment scheme is delivered but ten, 20 or 30 are delayed because they end up being litigated in the court because of these bad measures, that is not a measure of success. That is the problem here. Let us also talk about studio size. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from all of us on this side of the House. If a residential development is to be a good development, it has to meet the needs of the community who will live there. That means we need an appropriate distribution of studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and three-bedroom homes in each development, in each neighbourhood and beyond that. In order for those to be good quality homes, dual aspect is not a luxury. There has to be the appropriate volume of dual aspect, storage and amenity. What this change facilitates in respect of the section 28 guidelines and the planning policy statement - whichever, if either, of them ultimately becomes law - is that it skews the standards that exist to allow an overconcentration of studio and one-bedroom homes, and it reduces the amount of storage space, dual aspect and other community amenity. That is the problem. I would like to make another point about apartment design standards. When Irish Institutional Property produced a report on this some years ago, it compared our apartment design standards with those of other countries. It ignored that in many jurisdictions, there is far more public and amenity space which is part of people's living circumstances. Vienna is a good case in point. It is not just about apartments, but community facilities and amenities as well. That is something we struggle to do here in much of our public or private high-density developments. The argument just does not stand.
Sentiment score: -0.05
The Minister of State either does not understand the arguments we are putting forward or is wilfully ignoring them. Deputy Sheehan's point on the erosion of savings is a really important one. The Minister grossly inflated the savings. He alleged that there could be savings of €100,000 per unit. All of the industry, including Paul Mitchell from Mitchell McDermott, quickly came out publicly and said that was nonsense. The maximum saving from the design standards, according to reputable industry figures, is in the region of €30,000. Of course when you add in the VAT reduction, that is where the figure of €60,000 comes from. What has happened with apartments since these changes were announced? They have been in the ether now for a year. We are not seeing a dramatic increase in planning applications or grants for apartments, according to the data on the websites of the Department and the CSO. We are not seeing a significant increase in commencements or completions, particularly in the first quarter of this year. It is really interesting that new apartment inflation is running at almost double the level of new property inflation. It started off at about 6% this time last year, ratcheted up to 9.2% and then 9.4% in March and April, and levelled off in May at 8%. The Minister of State said that these measures would not just bring down the cost of delivery but bring down the cost of purchasing or renting as well. If they have had any effect at all - it is too early to say - all they have done is further inflated the market. That is before gifting developers another €20,000 to €30,000 in a VAT reduction that the apartments that were under construction last year, this year and early next year clearly did not need. They were already viable. To be clear, what the Minister of State is doing here - the Royal Institute of Architects made this point when the announcement was made last year, and the Irish Planning Institute made similar points - is facilitating bad development and substandard development. If these developments end up getting built - the Minister of State's view is that if one gets built, it is a success - their success will be determined by the quality of the homes and communities we provide for working people. If they are of poor quality and inferior to what we have today, that is definitely not success for these people, about whom I am ultimately concerned. I accept there is a viability problem; I think there are far better ways of addressing it. We should not force renters who will live in smaller, darker, more expensive apartments to pay the cost of that. That is a debate for another day. I really think the Minister of State has got this one badly wrong. I am not even convinced he fully understands how much he has gotten this badly wrong. I make no apology for opposing these sections.
Sentiment score: -0.05
Yes.
Sentiment score: 0.40
It is not agreed.
Sentiment score: -0.21