Shortage of planning staff causing housing delays

RTÉ News​

2 days ago

Sinn Féin's housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin said a shortage of planning staff both in councils and in An Bord Pleanála is causing an excessive delay in building houses.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said the Government has stated that the goal is to have 120 planners graduate each year, but it is not clear how this will be achieved in the Government's housing plan.
He said that the Government has its "head in the sand" and is ignoring advice from the professionals.
"Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael repeatedly have been told by the utilities, by professional planners, by people involved in public and private sector residential development what is required to get to the level of social affordable and private home ownership, new build homes that's required," he said.
"We need a workplace plan from the Government and centralised planners are not necessary as decisions are best made locally", he added.
He said that three years ago, the Government asked the City and County Managers' Association, the body that represents local authority managers, to do an assessment of how many additional planning staff they needed to meet the planning requirements at that time.
Mr Ó Broin said the report, which was given to the department in 2022, said that local authorities needed an additional 541 planning staff.
However, he said the parliamentary question that he got back from the minister last week stated that the Government provided sanction for 213 of those staff, but only 86 of those have been employed.
"So less than half what was required has been sanctioned, and less than half of that again has been employed. And in my dealings with local authorities they're telling us all the time, both in their housing departments and in their planning departments, they have a problem with retention," Eoin Ó Broin said.
"They don't have enough staff and there really doesn't seem to be any coherent plan from Government to address this," he said.
"And the direct consequence is it is taking far, far too long, both for local authorities and An Bord Pleanála, who also have a staffing deficit, to make crucial decisions, decisions on underlying critical infrastructure, housing and renewable energy projects," he stressed.
"We're not training up sufficient planners. We're also not able to keep all the planners that we're training and we're not making it as easy as we should do for people who might be, say, engineers in local authorities or related professions who want to scale up on the job and move across into planning," the Sinn Féin TD said.
He also criticised the Government's "so-called resources plan" saying it does not say how many planners the country has, or how many it needs.
"They say they want to get to 120 a year but they don't say how we're going to get to that number," he said.
"I've met with the Irish Planning Institute, I meet with public and private sector professional planners and they've been shouting about this for a very, very long time," he stated.
He said the Government can not plan for investment in water infrastructure or the electricity grid.
"They haven't invested in a plan to ensure we have an adequate number of planners, both in the public and private sector side. And that's one of the single biggest reasons why planning decisions and planning decisions on housing are being delayed," he said.
"We're about to have a revised national development plan and revised set of housing targets," he said.
"If there isn't an adequate workforce plan to set out from 2025 to 2030, how many additional planners we're going to recruit each year, then the Government is not going to meet its housing targets, its critical infrastructure targets its renewable energy targets and of course that will make working people's lives ever more difficult," he concluded.