A Broken Planning System is Letting Us All Down - My piece for the Daily Mail

Ireland’s housing disaster is the civil rights issue of this generation. It condemns working adults to their cramped childhood bedrooms. It subjects tenants to a rental casino, paying huge rents to live in insecure housing. Most shamefully of all, it has forced more than 13,000 people – including nearly 4,000 children – into homelessness.

It may not be the most accessible topic, but planning law is pivotal in this. Unfortunately, Ireland’s planning system is not working. It is slow, over-centralised, and mired in controversy. We all recognise the all-too-familiar sight of permanently boarded-up, empty sites in our neighbourhoods. Many such sites are owned by developers who have planning permission to turn them into homes but have instead left them idle – a depressing visual reminder of the dysfunction of our housing system. While we may be used to such a vista, it is not normal.

That is why people, the country over, were relieved to hear that the Minister for Housing would introduce “radical” reforms with the new Planning and Development Bill. After much delay, it was finally published last month. Running to more than 700 pages, it is the third longest bill in the State’s history. Unfortunately, in 700 pages, Minister O’Brien has done little to reassure those of us with concerns about our planning system’s capacity to deliver homes, with some even signalling that the legislation may be unconstitutional!

For starters, where is the much heralded and long promised ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ clause? That is the legal provision to penalise developers who secure permission to build homes, only then to sit on land, speculating on its value. Under pressure this year, Minister O’Brien committed to introducing the measure. Yet, he has since quietly dropped the proposal. A decision not to include the clause in this new law would mark a U-turn by him – and a significant win for developers.

We in Labour have proposed that compulsory purchase of the site by the local authority would occur, where the developer fails to activate planning permissions within a certain period. While he has signalled a willingness to look at our amendments, already, the Minister has indicated that he will not move to re-insert that ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ clause. It’s good news for big developers, but bad news for all of those locked out of purchasing a house.

That is not the only problem with Minister O’Brien’s legislation, either. We learned this week that the average combined salary that a couple hoping to buy a three-bed semi-d in Dublin must earn is now €127,000, according to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland. Yet, the average industrial wage stands at just over €42,000. Given that the cost of food, transport, and energy bills have also sky-rocketed, is it any wonder that families are all but completely excluded from homeownership?

Driving these house prices is a lack of new-builds, construction inflation, and labour shortages. Central to those challenges are delays and flaws in the planning system.

On Monday night, RTÉ Investigates exposed the sinister practice of individuals, with no genuine interest in a proposed development, using our planning system and judicial review as a means of demanding money from developers. Since that programme aired, I have personally received further evidence of such attempted bribes to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros. Those engaged in this behaviour don’t just make a quick buck off developers. They are also profiting at the expense of everyone who wants to move into a home of their own but cannot due to costs and delays. 

Prospective homebuyers, as well as residents’ associations, environmentalists, and neighbours with genuine concerns all lose out on account from the behaviour of an unscrupulous few. They must be stopped. We in Labour want to amend the Planning and Development Bill to make it a criminal offence to abuse the planning system in this way. Despite assurances of the Government that existing laws may address this behaviour, such a measure is clearly needed to stamp out corruption.

In the 1990s, Labour warned of corruption in the planning system. Those calls went ignored by Fianna Fáil Ministers at the time, with the public paying the ultimate price. Minister O’Brien should learn from the mistakes of his predecessors and work with us – on these amendments and others – to deliver a planning system that works for all those currently locked out of homeownership