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.
